In the interest of awesomeness, here is a compilation of scenes, refreshingly devoid of commentary, depicting today’s Meteorite flyover in Russia. Is this what the dinosaurs saw (&heard) 65 million years ago (only bigger)? Kind of haunting. Read about it in the San Francisco Chronicle. UPDATE! Here’s a recent article about a fragment recovered from an icy lake!
This is what I saw looking west from Marin County (San Francisco Bay Area). Nice!
Samsara* is the new movie from Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson. To use their own terms, this film can be viewed as a meditation on (you fill in the blank). Haunting, beautiful, poetic, surreal, epic (you fill in the superlatives). It will definitely provoke a reaction. See it on the big screen if you can.
* The term “Samsara” is associated with eastern religion, most notably Hinduism and Buddhism. It refers to the cycle of life: birth, suffering, death, rebirth.
Formation of the Earth’s Continents, 1952. Bonestell LLC.
Christmas 1955: my older brother receives a gift of this incredible book The World We Live In from my Grandparents. It is filled with all these incredible photographs and even more incredible paintings by various artists, basically depicting the story of our planet. I spent a lot of time looking at the pictures, especially the paintings in this book with a 5 year old’s sense of wonder (I have my own copy today, which still gives me a dose of nostalgia from time to time). These two paintings by Chesley Bonestell are from the first chapter of the book: The Earth Is Born. Thank you, Mister Bonestell!
Evolution of the Earth, 1952. Bonestell LLC.
Presenting Dave’s FREE time-lapse collection! on Vimeo. Various Time-Lapse scenes: clouds, city scenes, landscapes, textures and what-not, mostly in High Definition, available for download, absolutely FREE. More information and a demo film here.
This is a small selection of the Kodak Colorama photographs which were on display (as backlit transparencies) in Grand Central Station, New York City from 1950-1994. They were huge (60 feet wide) and over 500 were produced by various photographers using bulky large format cameras. Unfortunately for me, I never got to see one in its full size grandeur, so I can only imagine what it must have been like. But I am charmed by the quaint subject matter and stylized view of American Life, and since they were Kodak ads, there is usually someone in the scene with a Kodak camera (presumably containing Kodak film).
There is an underwhelming book I purchased a few years back, Colorama: The World’s Largest Photographs, underwhelming in that the pictures are poorly represented in a rather small book, with page folds in most of the pictures, alas.
Here is an interesting video where one of the photographers, Neil Montanus describes how one of the above images was captured (the underwater scene):
Last night me, myself and about a million other people gathered along the waterfront of San Francisco (I was on the beach at Crissy Field), to witness a 20 minute fireworks show in honor of the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th birthday.
On display in the American Museum of Natural History (NYC), is the Willamette Meteorite. It is composed of iron and nickel and weighs over 15 tons. It is the one of the largest meteorites ever found, and the largest found to date in North America. It was “discovered” in the Willamette Valley, Oregon in 1902 by a settler named Ellis Hughs (even though Native Americans had already known about it). There is no crater at the discovery site which led scientists to believe that the meteorite probably landed in Canada or Montana and was transported via glacial movement to the Oregon site. Kinda awesome. I check it out every time I go to NYC.
From the American Museum of Natural History, NYC. What is this doing here? Hey, I’m learning, it’s my first post, and I wanted to start with a cool picture.
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