Label: Cool Photo

February 5, 2013

Today’s Cool Photo of the Week is a Porcupinefish. They are found in warm tropical waters all over the world.

People often refer to them as "blowfish" because of their ability to make their body bigger and rounder by swallowing air or water. This reduces the number of predators to fish or animals with very large mouths. They even have a backup defense mechanism - those sharp spines, which stick out when the fish is inflated. Some of them have poison in their internal organs, another reason to avoid them. As you can imagine, this fish has very few predators.

Porcupinefish are just one of the fascinating creatures found in coral reefs, which is the subject of my new book, coming out at the end of April. These reefs are like huge cities under the sea, teeming with inhabitants from fish to plants to a wide variety of invertebrates like coral. I loved studying about them as I was writing the book, and I think you will be amazed by some of the photographs! 

January 29, 2013

The past week’s arctic blast has left this lighthouse in St. Joseph, Michigan encased in ice. It is actually not unusual for the lighthouses at this point where the St. Joseph River flows into Lake Michigan to ice over during winter storms, but this is a particularly magnificent photograph because of the pink, sunset light.

Photo: Lisa Davidson Rundell 

January 25, 2013

Most of North America is shivering in freezing, Arctic temperatures. It is also very windy where we live, near the Berkshire Mountains. I pulled off the road when I was driving the other day to take this shot. The high altitude cirrus clouds were being "shredded" by the wind…and they were pulled into a shape that made it look like an exclamation point. 

Or maybe it is a comment on the freezing temperature up there?

January 15, 2013

Dust + Rain = An Amazing Sight!

This incredible sight is the result of a rain cloud and a dust storm meeting and combining off the western coast of Australia. Tug boat worker Brett Martin snapped this photograph of the amazing red cloud traveling rapidly across the Indian Ocean.

January 8, 2013

The Cassini orbiter - an unmanned space probe - sent back this magnificent image of Saturn last month. The reason this photograph is so spectacular is that the orbiter is shooting from the "dark side" of Saturn, so the planet is glowing with the sun’s light behind it.

Look closely at the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph - do you see anything there? Those two little spots are Enceladus and Tethys, two of Saturn’s moons.

Here’s what Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, said about this image:"Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those we have taken from Saturn’s shadow. They unveil a rare splendor seldom seen anywhere else in our solar system."

December 18, 2012

We noticed in last week’s AWESOME SCIENCE WORD contest that a number of you chose minerals, which often have beautiful crystals and are cut into what we commonly call “gems” or “jewels.”

This is a photograph of crystals of the mineral Callaghanite. It was named in honor of Dr. Eugene Callaghan, who was the Director of the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, in honor of his work studying magnesite deposits. This mineral contains magnesium and is typically found in an area with a magnesium deposit.

For those of you who are interested, the chemical formula for callaghanite is Cu2Mg2(CO3)(OH)6•2(H2O). Can you say that three times fast? 

December 11, 2012

Today we are sharing three "Cool Photos of the Week," , all from Russian photographer Andrew Osokin. These are all photographs of snowflakes, taken using an extreme macro lens.

Aren’t they beautiful? It makes me wish for snow!

December 4, 2012

My choice for Cool Photo of the Week is this shot of wild horses thundering through a canyon. It was shot by photographer Katarzyna Okrzesik. Aren’t they magnificent?

 You can read more about HORSES in my book of the same name. Look for it in your library!

Teachers - there is also a free, downloadable Teacher Guide to HORSES on this website. Click here to access. 

November 28, 2012

Today’s Cool Photo of the Week is of hundreds of Blue Morpho butterflies gathered on a tree trunk in the rainforest. The blue morpho (Morpho peleides) is one of the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan from 5 to 8  inches (12 to 20 centimeters). If you spread your fingers as wide apart as you can, that’s roughly the size of a morpho butterfly!

The blue morpho lives in the rainforests of Latin America, from Mexico to Colombia. They are only bright blue on top of their wings. The bottom side is a dull brown with many eyespots, so that when birds and larger insect predators are looking up from the ground, the morpho is camouflaged.

Airplane pilots flying over the rainforest have reported seeing huge groups of blue morphos sunning themselves on top of the forest canopy. What a beautiful sight that would be!

There is a photo of a Blue Morpho in my book BUTTERFLIES, where you can learn lots more about these beautiful creatures that smell with their antennae and taste with their feet. Or, you can click here for a video preview of the book.

November 21, 2012

I can hardly bring myself to call this the "Cool Photo of the Week." It is more like the ASTOUNDING photo of the week!

This shipwreck was long buried under the sand dunes on Fire Island - a barrier island off Long Island, New York. The force of Hurricane Sandy completely reconfigured the beaches of Fire Island, and exposed the bones of this wrecked schooner.

Park rangers think that it is the wreck of the Bessie White, which ran aground off Fire Island in either 1919 or 1922 - almost 100 years ago! The Bessie White was a four-mast Canadian schooner, went aground in heavy fog. The crew and the ship’s cat escaped in lifeboats, but they couldn’t save the ship or the tons of coal that it was carrying.

Seeing the sand rearranged to the point that this buried shipwreck is revealed really gives you an idea of how strong the winds and surf are during a hurricane. 

Photo: Cheryl Hapke, USGS 

« First  <  2 3 4 5 6 >  Last »