Label: Cool Photo

October 30, 2012

We are a little bit late with our posting of today’s Cool Photo of the Week because of the power outages here on the East Coast. But, we’re back online just in time to share this special, COOL HALLOWEEN PHOTO OF THE WEEK!

And since the Cygnus Loop Nebula looks like a ghost, it reminds me to wish all my readers a Happy, Out of This World Halloween!

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

October 23, 2012

It’s not just humans that find the doctor’s stethoscope is too cold when we go for our checkups.

This is Yakini, a newborn gorilla, being examined at the Melbourne Zoo, in Australia. Look at her face. I think we all know that feeling!

October 9, 2012

It is cranberry harvest time all across the US and Canada. Cranberries grow on long vines in peat marshes - soft, marshy ground, usually near wetlands. When cranberries reach their peak color and plumpness this time of year, growers flood the fields with up to 18 inches (nearly one-half meter) of water. Then the farmers use machines to stir up the water - causing the cranberries to break from their vines and float to the top of the water so they can be harvested.

Our friend, the author/illustrator Scott Nash (his excellent new novel is THE HIGH SKY ADVENTURES OF BLUE JAY THE PIRATE), took this great shot of an unexpected bonus in amongst the cranberries. And that’s today’s Cool Photo of the Week - a blog about a frog in a bog on Cape Cod! 

October 5, 2012

If you haven’t yet had a chance to read my new book, SEYMOUR SIMON’S EXTREME EARTH RECORDS, you can check out some of the powerful photographs and extreme facts in this new slideshow on the Huffington Post Book Blog. 

Which of the seven Extreme Earth Records in this slideshow do you think is the most interesting, beautiful or surprising? 

Click here to view!

October 2, 2012

Tourists come from all over to visit Japan’s Toyama Bay between March and June, when millions of breeding firefly squid come to Toyama Bay to drop their eggs. The firefly squid is bioluminescent (buy-oh-loom-ih-NESS-cent), which means that is has special organs in its body that can produce light. Each of the squid’s tentacle has a light-producing organ called a photophore (FO-to-for). The squids flash these lights to attract small fish, on which the squid can then feed. The firefly squid can also light up its whole body to attract a mate.

I would love to see this, wouldn’t you?

September 25, 2012

Today’s "Cool Photo of the Week" is a footbridge in Kakum National Park in Ghana (Africa). Visitors to the rainforest walk across this bridge to take a close look at life in the canopy - both plants and animals.

You need to be a brave explorer to cross this bridge, though. While there are hand rails and net walls on either side of you, you are putting one foot in front of the other, walking on a single plank that is just one foot (1/3  meter) wide. And, you’re a sky high 100 feet (30 meters) off the forest floor!

I’m not a big fan of heights; I probably wouldn’t walk across this bridge. Would you want to try?

September 18, 2012

Today’s Cool Photo of the Week is an image that I came across of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupting. When natural events of this magnitude happen, we are reminded how little control we have of many of the forces at work on our planet. Although these events can be destructive, they are often very beautiful, as well.

The black cloud that you see against the night sky is ash being spewed into the air by the force of the eruption. Because this glacial volcano is located underneath an icecap, the hot magma cools fairly quickly, turning to ash and grit. That cooling created the giant cloud of ash that shut down air travel on six continents for over a week back in 2010.

The white smoke at the bottom left is steam from the melting ice. And isn’t the lightning magnificent? We often see low energy lightning leaping between particles of lava and ash as they are hurled from the volcanic vent at very high speeds.

September 11, 2012

You may have already seen this magnificent photograph of Mars, taken by the mast camera on the Curiosity rover. Everyone has marveled at how much it looks like Earth, with its gravely surface and sandy dunes.

Here is a cool fact that you may not have heard about this photograph. If you were standing on Mars, these are not the colors that you would see in front of you. The dust in the planet’s atmosphere makes everything look very red, including this sandy dune.

The reason this photograph isn’t red is that NASA’s engineers are doing something called "white balancing" - adjusting the colors to make the scene look the way it would with the kind of light we have here on Earth. They do this to help out a particular bunch of Earthlings - the geologists who are studying the images with eyes that are trained to recognize rocks, minerals and other substances in more familiar light.

September 4, 2012

This is Caddy, a baby wombat, who was rescued from her mother’s pouch after her mother was hit by a car. Wombats are marsupials, a group of mammals that are known for carrying and feeding their young in a pouch. Volunteers from a wildlife shelter in Melbourne, Australia took her in and made her a cloth pouch to live in. It is hung off the side of a crib, just above the ground, so that it feels to Caddy as though she is in her mother’s pouch.

Caddy is sharing the nursery with several other rescued wombats that are her size and being fed a special milk mixture from a bottle. After she is old enough, she will be released back into the wild. 

Photo: Craig Borrow / Newspix via Rex USA

August 29, 2012

Imagine exploring the most extreme parts of our amazing planet - trekking through the driest desert, climbing the snowiest mountaintops, and diving to the deepest regions of the ocean floor.

Published today by Chronicle Books, Seymour Simon’s newest book, EXTREME EARTH RECORDS, investigates Earth’s biggest, smallest, deepest, and coldest environments, animals, plants and most severe weather. These mind-bending facts and photographs invite readers on an exciting and sometimes unbelievable, scientific exploration of Earth’s most amazing records!

Here’s an excerpt from a section in the book, about the Highest Place on Earth: Mt. Everest.

More than 4,000 people have tried to climb the mountain but fewer than 700 have actually reached the summit. Mt. Everest is dangerous; approximately 150 people have died on the slopes of the mountain. Besides the lack of oxygen and the winds, Everest is also very cold. Temperatures often drop to -100 degrees F. Even on a nice summer day, temperatures are well below zero. The climb is also very difficult because men and women lose their footing on the unstable snow and ice. Climbers often use aluminum ladders to go up and down the icy sides. 

Look for Seymour Simon’s EXTREME EARTH RECORDS in bookstores, and on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, starting today!

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