Label: Cool Photo

January 3, 2011

This is a photograph of galaxy NGC 1275, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Though this galaxy is 230 million light-years away, it is one of the closest to our own Milky Way galaxy. The thin red strings surrounding the galaxy are cool gases, as compared to the white hot - 100-million-degrees Fahrenheit! – gas in the center.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgment: A. Fabian (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK)

December 21, 2010

Nothing like setting your alarm for 3:10 am, only to discover that the skies were too overcast to see last night’s full lunar eclipse. We heard this from friends right across the U.S., unfortunately.

The good news is that NASA’s  Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted hundreds of great photos - click here if you’d like to see more (SeeMore - get it? haha). 

December 18, 2010

This tiny marine snail has a unique way of protecting itself. When it feels threatened, it lights up its plain, yellowish shell and emits a bright, neon green light. It probably makes it appear larger than it is to potential predators. In a laboratory experiment, scientists found that the snail lit up when confronted by crabs and swimming shrimp.

The snail, Hinea brasiliana, is a type of clusterwink snail that is typically found bunched up in groups along rocky shorelines. The green glow results from a phenomenon known as bioluminescence - or light made by living animals (pronounced "bio-loom-i-NESS-ens"). The most familiar example of bioluminescence is the firefly, which is actually a beetle. Fireflies use the flickering patterns of light to attract mates.

 Photo: Dimitri Deheyn / SIO / UCSD 

December 16, 2010

What do you think the snake in this picture is doing?

If you said she’s trying to bite someone or something, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. If you said she is smelling the air around her, you got it it right! Snakes use their tongues to smell. She is flicking her tongue in the air because she’s looking for prey, or perhaps checking to see if there are predators nearby.

This is a European Grass Snake (Natrix natrix), sometimes called the Ringed Snake or Water Snake. This female is almost three-feet long (as tall as a first grader), but she is a non-venomous snake. It is often found near water and feeds almost exclusively on amphibians.

Photo: Wilder Kaiser 

December 13, 2010

This weekend I spent a lot of time fooling around with Google Earth, marveling at the incredibly crisp and clear satellite photographs of my house, my street, my neighborhood…..  It is incredible (though a little spooky!) to see the kind of pictures we can capture from cameras orbiting in the exosphere (the outermost portion of Earth’s atmosphere).

Then this morning I came across this photograph of the tallest building in the world - the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai. It was taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite from an altitude of 423 miles. Look at how tiny the other buildings down on the ground look…..and then look at how big the Buri Khalifa appears. Can you think of another way to know, by looking at this photograph, that the building is very tall?

You can tell by looking at the shadows cast by all of the buildings in the photograph. The big building has a shadow that is at least 5 times longer than the shadow of any other building in this cityscape. That really tells you something about how tall this building is!

This skyscraper stands 2,717 feet high, has 160 floors, and is the tallest human-made structure ever built. When the building was opened in January of this year, it returned the location of Earth’s tallest free-standing structure to the Middle East, where the Great Pyramid of Giza held the record for almost four thousand years (up until 1311, when they built the Lincoln Cathedral in England).

When I wrote my book SKYSCRAPERS in 2005, the tallest building in the world was Taipei Financial Center in Taiwan. It rose 1,667 feet into the air, and had 101 stories. 

I wrote in that book:

Skyscrapers are super-tall buildings that seem to scrape against the sky.

When you look down from a high window, people on the streets look like tiny ants.

Clouds may drift by below your view. It feels like you’re on top of the world.

How I would love to be able to look down from the top of this new record-holder. Talk about being in the clouds!

December 1, 2010

An Amazon milk frog (Trachycephalus resinifictrix) soaks up some rays on a flower in a zoo in Cleveland, Ohio.

Why are they called Milk Frogs? Because of the milky-looking fluid the frog excretes when it is stressed or threatened.

Photo by: Amy Sancetta/AP

November 11, 2010

How do insects know when it’s time to take a bath? When their feet get dirty and lose their stickiness! Insects depend on their adhesive footpads to help them travel safely on leaves, along braches, even over craggy rocks. A new study of the behavior of beetles found that when they start to slip, they know it is time to stop and groom themselves!

Leaf Beetle photo: S.N. Gorb, University of Kiel, Germany 

October 13, 2010

People often ask me if I personally shoot all the photographs in my photo-essay books, since both words and images are so important in telling the story. The answer is that although I use my own photographs whenever I can, often the subject matter demands photographs that can only be had from specialists. For example, books like PENGUINS or the forthcoming BUTTERFLIES include photos by professionals who have literally spent years observing and photographing these animals. Part of what I do when I’m writing a book is photo research - scouring the archives to find photographs that I believe will best illuminate and in many cases expand on the text. Sometimes, if I find a photograph that is interesting enough, I will even rewrite the page to go with the photograph. It is a fluid process, writing and doing photo research, and one that I really enjoy. 

I do, however, photograph nature and animals often….pretty much every week I find one day when I can get away from my desk and spend time in the outdoors with my camera. We recently visited an alpaca farm in Columbia County, NY, and I found these animals to be irresistibly photogenic. The bangs hanging over their eyes certainly enhance what are already quirky, expressive faces!  

 We often are tempted to assign human emotions to animals…..like thinking that this little guy is looking at me quizzically. The fact of the matter is, when you get close to an alpaca, it often summons up green liquid (from chewing its cud) to spit at you. Spitting is how they stake out their territory, as well as reinforce the pecking order in the herd. Unfortunately, when an alpaca is sucking on partially digested grass, he often gets a bad case of sour mouth.

So, although I’d like to tell you a lovely story about how this young cria (pronounced "cree-ah," the Spanish word for baby alpaca, commonly used among English-speaking breeders, too) and I established a wonderful relationship, the truth is he was just letting me know I was getting too close to his territory!

June 30, 2010

Every year, Nikon hosts a photomicrography competition called "Small World." ("Photomicrography" is in our Science Dictionary if you’d like to look it up!). Wired.com just published six incredible super-closeups of bug eyes (like this one, which is the eye of a common house fly). Click on the link and check these out - they are both creepy and really gorgeous.

May 28, 2010

I came upon a lovely scene while driving on this pre-Memorial Day afternoon.

« First  <  10 11 12 13 >