pixels and pictures

The first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, returned by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue.

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.

The haze particles themselves are likely gray or red, but the way they scatter blue light has gotten the attention of the New Horizons science team. “That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles,” said science team researcher Carly Howett, also of SwRI. “A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger — but still relatively small — soot-like particles we call tholins.”

Scientists believe the tholin particles form high in the atmosphere, where ultraviolet sunlight breaks apart and ionizes nitrogen and methane molecules and allows them to react with one another to form more and more complex negatively and positively charged ions. When they recombine, they form very complex macromolecules, a process first found to occur in the upper atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The more complex molecules continue to combine and grow until they become small particles; volatile gases condense and coat their surfaces with ice frost before they have time to fall through the atmosphere to the surface, where they add to Pluto’s red coloring.

Eight thousand years ago, around the time humans were just getting good at farming, a star 20 times as big as our sun blew up about 2,100 light years from here. This feathery ribbon is the aftermath.

NASA just released this eye-popping image of the Veil Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula, which looks a little like the Nexus from a certain forgettable Star Trek movie, spans 110 light years across. It's so huge that this image is merely a mosaic of Hubble pictures that together cover about two light years. As is typically the case with Hubble's unforgettable nebula pictures, the colors you see actually represent the stuff it's made of. Here, red is hydrogen, green is sulfur, and blue is oxygen.

Photography startup Light has launched L16, which the company's calling a "a multi-aperture computational camera," at the Code/Mobile conference. It's named L16, because it's equipped with 16 individual lenses, though unlike bulky and heavy DSLRs, Recode says it's just about the size of a Nexus 6 that's double the thickness. When you take a picture using the camera, all 16 lenses capture photos simultaneously at different focal lengths in order to "capture more data in every shot." Light's technology then combines all of them into a single 52-megapixel image -- you can adjust the photo's depth of field, focus and exposure after it's been captured.

The L16 runs on Android and has built-in WiFi, allowing you to post pictures directly from the device. It comes with an integrated 35mm-150mm optical zoom and a five-inch touchscreen display. If you think you'll be able to save money switching to this from an entry-level or mid-range DSLR, though, you're sadly mistaken. It might not cost as much as high-end cameras, but it'll still set you back $1,299 when you pre-order from today until November 6th from Light's website. When it starts shipping in the summer of 2016, you'll have to shell out $1,699 to get one.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.

This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity. The image comes from the left-eye camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam). The color has been calibrated and white-balanced to remove camera artifacts. Mastcam sees color very similarly to what human eyes see, although it is actually a little less sensitive to blue than people are.

Dust in the Martian atmosphere has fine particles that permit blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than longer-wavelength colors. That causes the blue colors in the mixed light coming from the sun to stay closer to sun's part of the sky, compared to the wider scattering of yellow and red colors. The effect is most pronounced near sunset, when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter often takes images of Martian sand dunes to study the mobile soils. These images provide information about erosion and movement of surface material, about wind and weather patterns, even about the soil grains and grain sizes. However, looking past the dunes, these images also reveal the nature of the substrate beneath.

Within the spaces between the dunes, a resistant and highly fractured surface is revealed. The fractured ground is resistant to erosion by the wind, and suggests the material is bedrock that is now shattered by a history of bending stresses or temperature changes, such as cooling, for example.

Les images qui suivent vont vous offrir un spectacle magnifique que l’on a pas assez l’occasion de découvrir.

Ce sont des photographies fournies par la NASA où l’on voit notre belle planète Terre vue de l’Espace. On y découvre différentes villes, différents continents, différents reliefs et on y découvre également la vie à travers les lumières que l’on produit à la surface.

Update : ce sont bien des photos qui ont été fournies par la NASA à la base, puis Anton Balazh a ensuite fait un superbe travail de post-prod afin d’améliorer le relief, les couleurs, la lumière, etc…

A 66-year-old Japanese tourist has died, and his travel companion has been injured, after falling down stairs while attempting to take a selfie at the Taj Mahal.

The man's death raises the selfie toll this year — to 12. To put that in perspective, in 2015 there have so far been eight deaths caused by shark attacks.

It sounds like a joke, but unfortunately it isn't: The deaths are a tragic reminder to travelers that focusing on a phone screen instead of unfamiliar surroundings is not safe.

Four of the selfie deaths this year, like the tourist, identified as Hideto Ueda, were caused by falling.

The next leading cause of deaths involving selfies was being hit or injured by trains, either because the individual was taking trying to get a photo with a train or because the photo they wanted involved getting on dangerous equipment.

As she writes : "But the most wonderful "brain malfunction" of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song.
Having synesthesia isn't distracting or disorienting. It adds a unique vibrance to the world I experience."

LinX, founded in 2009, says its products are "significantly smaller than any camera on the market today, leading the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets". Camera technology has been an important differentiator for smartphones since Sharp and Samsung released the first models in 2000. The vendors have raced to squeeze capabilities developed for dedicated and even professional digital cameras into handsets, with breakthroughs like Nokia's 41-megapixel Lumia 1020, separate image processing units and 3D. Ever-higher resolution is running out of steam as a selling point, so the OEMs are looking to new features such as depth perception and 3D. Intel recently demonstrated its RealSense 3D depth camera, originally developed for laptops, in a 5-inch smartphone. Highly realistic perception of depth, light and motion can be delivered by an array of cameras - a technology pioneered by Pelican Imaging, which is financially backed by Qualcomm and Nokia, and also seen in RealSense. Depth sensing can be used for gesture control (as in Microsoft Kinect) and user identification, among other applications. However, power consumption is a challenge.

As granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple's U.S Patent No. 8,988,564 for a "Digital camera with light splitter" examines the possibilities of embedding a three-sensor prism-based camera module within the chassis of a thin wireless device, such as an iPhone. Light splitting systems do not require color channel processing or demosaicing, thereby maximizing pixel array resolution.
Commonly found in prosumer video cameras, and more recently in handheld camcorder models, three-sensor imaging technology splits incident light entering a camera into three wavelengths, or colors, using a prism or prisms. Usually identified as red, green and blue, the split images are picked up by dedicated imaging sensors normally arranged on or close to the prism face.