What Koyaanisqatsi has to do with William Shatner and the future of space exploration.
We’ve seen — and loved — our share of CarlSaganremixes over the years. This month, as NASA’s iconic Space Shuttle took its final launch, Reid Gower has commemorated the program’s momentous legacy with another fantastic Carl Sagan mashup, remixing voiceover from Sagan’s iconic Pale Blue Dot with classic footage from sources as varied as Baraka, Stephen Hawkins’ Into The Universe, BBC’s The Cell and Sagan’s own Cosmos, among many more.
We had an expansive run in the ’60s and the ’70s. You might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was over. But, instead, we’ve pulled inward. Robots aside, we’ve backed off from the planets and the stars. I keep asking myself: is it a failure of nerve, or a sign of maturity?” ~ Carl Sagan
The remix is part of Gower’s excellent ongoing Sagan Series. For more fan-made NASA love, don’t miss thesetwo remarkable tributes, as well as this beautiful NASA-produced documentary about Space Shuttle’s legacy narrated by none other than William Shatner.
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The Earth, the Moon, the stars, and the joys of geekdom.
This being the International Year of Astronomy and all, we thought it would be kind of nice to swap the daily screen stare for a wide look at the open skies. Granted, we can’t really do that, but we can try to do both.
The Sky in Motion is a fascinating, hypnotic project featuring several time-lapse videos, each composed of over 7,000 images revealing the richness of our skies. Featured in NASA‘s Astronomy Picture of the Day, this video blends the romantic obsession over the Moon, the Sun and the stars with the scientific awe of meteors, satellites, and crepuscular rays — all framed by the wonder of Earth’s own rotation.
Seems like NASA has come a long way from those laughable times we shall not speak of again.
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Summer has come and gone, and Americans are already filling their scrapbooks with photos from their 2008 staycation — you know, the stay-put vacation alternative enforced by those notorious gas prices. And while some have tried to make lemonade with it all by re-discovering and re-appreciating their home states (one has to wonder what a two-week appreciation of, say, Wisconsin entails), others have gone the other way: thinking up fun, creative stuff that can be done just as well in Manhattan as it could in the Maldives.
Case in point: Flickrer hb19′s sky play photo set, using nothing but the sky and a simple object to create clever scenes that take us back to those magical childhood days when clouds were dragons and unicorns and exotic fishes.
A year and a half after the start of the THEMIS mission (that’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms… what, it’s the government, they’re no catchphrase pros), a fleet of five satellites probing Earth’s magnetic field, scientists have pinned down the reason why the Northern Lights dance their magic dance: magnetic reconnection, a sudden burst of substorms, brightenings and rapid movements that occur when stressed magnetic field lines suddenly “snap” to a different shape, much like snapping open an overstretched rubber band.
This phenomenon, it turns out, is common throughout the universe and in our particular case happens about a third of the way to the moon.
So think of us next time you share this at a dinner party to boost your smart-cool factor, will ya?
COUTURE FOR THE EYE
That fascination with the summer sky seems like something Flickr amateurs share with the photographic legends of our time.
This summer, legendary duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot legendary model Giselle Bündchen for W Magazine‘s “Kiss The Sky” editorial, styled by the legendary Alex White. (See? We mean business with all that legends stuff.)
Besides the oddly brave use of seemingly safe color, we’re mesmerized by the enchanted play with light.
Keeping with the theme of clouds, fashion and scientific geekiness, there’s a different kind of cloud extracting oohs and ahhs from its observers: the smart kids at MIT have built the Fiber Optic Cloud, a mind-blowing sculpture made of 15,000 optical fibers, each individually addressable and responsive to human interaction through hundreds of sensors.
The 13-foot cloud, constructed of carbon glass, contains over 40 miles of fiber optics and expresses context awareness — which means that when admirers interact with it through touch, it reflects emotion and behavior through sound and lightness-darkness signaling.
The cloud lives in Florence and launched as an ongoing project to rethink the fashion trade show concept on an interactive, sensory level.
We just hope it’s not nearly as moody as the divas of haute couture.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it's cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
Summer has come and gone, and Americans are already filling their scrapbooks with photos from their 2008 
