Photography

Check out this amazing picture that amateur astronomer Thierry Legault took with his telescope. This picture looks like it is straight of an awesome science fiction movie.

This is the second time that I have shared a photo from space with you, my loyal reader. Get used to it. Pictures of space are like, totally awesome.

On to more personal matters, I’m scheduled to take a trip to Bangkok and Singapore in a matter of weeks. I’ll be spending several days in each city, as well as a 4 day train trip in between the two on the Orient Express. I’m starting to get pretty excited as our planning for the trip ramps up.

This weekend I bought a tiny little Dell Mini 10″ laptop so that we can both store photos and if need be, keep in touch with the rest of the world. Of course, we’ll be staying on point and avoid keeping in touch with the rest of the world like the plague… because we’ll be in the middle of Malaysia on the Orient Express! Expect some photos and travel posts!

Look at this. In Saturn’s Shadow – the Pale Blue Dot (NASA Cassini Saturn Mission Images). This is one of the best space images I have ever seen. I hope you like it as much as I did. Yeah, I know it’s old, but somehow I missed this. Or maybe I forgot how awesome it was.

The interesting thing about this photo, as if Saturn in all it’s glory, photographed from a small man made spacecraft wasn’t enough, is that the Earth is visible. Of course, Earth is only a couple of pixels big and could just as well be a spec on the lens. But that’s not what it is… that’s us.

I always feel a little bit uncomfortable about these images because of how they are created. I get the feeling that the majority of people that see these images must think that the spacecraft has a sweet digital camera on board that can just snap shots like this… when in fact practically every image we see from NASA is a composite, color adjusted, photoshopped image. I don’t really care though.  I know that at the core of it all, this is the image that the data can and did produce.

Insert funny joke here, humanizing Saturn by noting it’s disdain for marriage due to a build-up of unnecessary rings.

Hey let’s talk about art!

Many moons ago a good friend of mind curated an art exhibit called Crazians at the World of Wonder in Hollywood. It was a really cool show with lots of interesting art, the likes of which I hadn’t seen much of before. In particular there was one painting that caught my eye, and after running things over with my wife we decided to purchase it. Now I’m not a regular purveyor of art, so I was really entering some new territory with this experience. Fortunately, when you know the curator, it’s a snap.

The guy responsible for the painting we liked is Lawrence Yang. After doing some great-googling-moogley I found that he has quite the online presence going. You can see a lot of his work at his website. The piece we got was called ‘blue triptych’ and it’s hanging on our living room wall next to the entertainment center. It’s quite nice, and a bit alternative, which is a good mix for our place. It looks considerably different than the photo up on his website though, I think he must’ve made some changes or taken the picture as a work in progress. Here’s a snapshot – strike a pose!

Why ever would you make the peace sign in a photo like this?

Here we are… about to make our big purchase. The first piece of art we bought together! Let me be honest with you though, there’s two things wrong in this photo. I can’t explain my wife’s actions. Nor my smugness.

You can see that Lawrence Yang is still kicking out some awesome art at his blog too. He also makes these GelaSkins for various devices that are pretty cool. It’s weird, I was just looking at those things last week, and now I find out that I own a piece by one of the artists!