Wow:



From here:
www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/11/scenes_from_antarctica.html

Oh, thanks for reminding me. I've been meaning to write about this:

Last Friday I was at the opening of a small exhibition of Stuart Heydinger's photography at Kingston Museum. His name wasn't familiar to me, but it should have been. He was one of the foremost photographers in Fleet Street in the fifties capturing the moment with a single-shot five-by-four camera (imagine that - the photographer attending a news event having to judge the one moment to take the photograph); in the sixties covering conflicts in Algeria, Kashmir, South Tyrol - all over the globe, in fact - until the things he saw in Biafra finally became just too much.

He was there in person, and the opening of the exhibition included an interview with the great man - anecdotes and revelations all delivered in that cultured, self-deprecating yet fiercely determined way that a certain type of Englishman of that vanishing generation affect so unaffectedly. It was a huge privilege, I can tell you.







Details of the exhibition. Go if you've a sliver of a chance.

I was going to post some of those Antarctica ones myself. That one you posted is truly remarkable. I also like:

Wow! Where to start?

The portraits of George Hoyningen-Huene, who took Horst as a lover and allegedly totally inspired the look of Horst's own world-famous photography. In particular, his portrait of an Arab in Tunisia, (entitled, I think, simply 'Tunisia 1936') is incredibly haunting, mainly because - peculiarly for a portrait - the face is completely invisible. Given that it's a quite well-known image, it's strangely hard to find using google, so here it is being used on the cover of Hoodlum Priest's album, 'Heart of Darkness':



(This is the CD. It actually looked better on the LP, where it was just a small image in the dead centre of an otherwise blank white sleeve. See here. You can't link to Discogs.com images now!)

Landscape-wise, Richard Misrach's 'Golden Gate' series of photos sticks in my memory. All taken from exactly the same spot on his porch over a period of several years, you can see the changing - and sometimes freakish - weather conditions around the bridge throughout the seasons.











All the cosmology-related photographs that GY posts here are brilliant and, in fact, I could quite happily spend my entire life looking at the kinds of photos that grace the pages of National Geographic. There are so many true works of art amongst them.

Clive did that Hoodlum Priest come out before or after Microphonies?

gt3 wrote:
Clive did that Hoodlum Priest come out before or after Microphonies?

After, GT, but they're actually completely different photos. I seem to remember that the CV one is a still taken from an experimental(?) short film by some artist, where the bloke in the image has his face wrapped in bandages and is eating an egg (or something) but is letting it spill from his mouth. I could be entirely wrong about all this, of course. I'll have to wait for our very own former Mallinder-impersonator, Wingco, to give his take on it.

Speaking of cosmology related pictures, OTF favourite Fomalhaut's Ring just got even cooler.



That dot in the boxout - that's a freaking planet.

Ginger Yellow wrote:
That dot in the boxout - that's a freaking planet.

Probably in the past tense now, though, I would have thought!

BTW - what was it about that dot in particular that made them identify it as a planet? I mean, there's a similar-looking dot to the left of it and up slightly. It's amazing, nonetheless.

From Bad Astronomy: The star in question is Fomalhaut, a star easily visible to the unaided eye; it’s the brightest star in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, the 18th brightest in the sky, and only 25 light years away. It’s literally millions of times brighter than the planet, so the Hubble camera uses an occulting bar, a small piece of metal that blocks the brightest part of the star’s image. The blacked-out area in the center of the picture is where Fomalhaut is (also, the star’s image has been digitally subtracted using an image of another star as a template; that further reduces the amount of unwanted light). The radial lines are not real; they are an optical effect of the very bright star. The ring is real; it’s dust leftover from the formation of the star and the planet. In fact, the thinness of the ring was a big factor in assuming a planet was lurking there; the planet’s gravity sculpts the ring, keeping it narrowly confined. Also, the ring is off-center from the star, and a planet in an elliptical orbit would explain that nicely.

The planet itself is just that small dot, almost lost in the noise from the star and the light from the ring. I’ll be honest; had I been analyzing the image, I might have missed it at first. But it’s there, and it’s real. Images taken almost two years apart show that the planet is moving with the star, and is consistent with it orbiting Fomalhaut at a distance of about 18 billion km (11 billion miles). That’s four times the distance of Neptune from the Sun. It takes 872 years to make one complete orbit. The mass is not easy to determine, and is estimated using its effect on the ring; it’s likely to be about the same size and mass as Jupiter.

The planet is unnamed, and is simply called Fomalhaut b.

You can see the two images superimposed here.The small white box at lower right pinpoints the planet's location. Fomalhaut b has carved a path along the inner edge of a vast, dusty debris ring encircling Fomalhaut that is 21.5 billion miles across. Fomalhaut b lies 1.8 billion miles inside the ring's inner edge and orbits 10.7 billion miles from its star.

The inset at bottom right is a composite image showing the planet's position during Hubble observations taken in 2004 and 2006. Astronomers have calculated that Fomalhaut b completes an orbit around its parent star every 872 years.

The photo with NY Times article doesn't show Fomalhaut as a bright white spot at the center.

Clive, you're right about the spillage from the guys mouth on the cover of Microphonies. It's just that that Hoodlum Priest cover seems like a direct reference.

Clive, those Golden Gate views were taken from the Berkeley hills, I had that view from my bedroom window for a long time. Here's a live cam view of the same subject;

sv.berkeley.edu/view/

When I worked in the UCLA bookstore, the book of those Golden Gate photos was very popular among employees--it was oversized, so we kept it behind the counter on display, and it was always nice to flip through when it was slow.

The photo with NY Times article doesn't show Fomalhaut as a bright white spot at the center.

Uh, so?

Ginger Yellow wrote:
The photo with NY Times article doesn't show Fomalhaut as a bright white spot at the center.

Uh, so?

So has the one that does been digitally altered?

Well, they've all been digitally altered, but kind of, yeah. It's just had a white dot put where Fomalhaut should be. All the photos were taken using a technique that blocks out the direct light from Fomalhaut.

What the hell is that?

my guess was some sort of creature (an insect perhaps, or a seahorse) on its side, and photographed using some weird technique. though i expect i shall find it is a distant nebula or something, or the inside of rory delap's ballbag