If you shoot a satellite into space, give it a camera and nothing better to do, it takes really great photos of earth.
Some highlights: Ireland, complete with aqua-coloured plankton blooms, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Great Barrier Reef.
(Found via metafilter)
The astrodome is inflated and open for visits at Central Library. I went in yesterday for a visit and it was very cool – well worth a look. Five stars from me, I reckon. It’s open to the public from 4pm to 8pm (last entry is at 7.30pm) for the rest of this week only, and each visit takes half an hour. There’s an article in today’s Dom Post with more information.
From Tuesday the 9th to Saturday 13th June the YA area at Central Library will be transformed into a planetarium as it hosts the NightVisionz Cosmodome. Using a digital audio visual show to simulate the stars and a dome large enough to take 30 people inside at a time, visitors will be able to boldly journey through the night sky and learn about Matariki and other constellations with astronomer Ron Fisher.
The Cosmodome is a great experience for children, teens, and adults alike and will be open to the public from 4-8pm from the Tuesday to Friday and 10am-4pm on the Saturday. Entry is by gold coin donation and sessions are on the half hour – people just need to turn up.
Read more about it at our astronomy blog (I write some of the posts there!) The astrodome/planetarium/cosmodome looks like a large, inflatable, and blue igloo.
If you’ve ever seen the sky at night – the moon rising over Lake Taupo, say, or maybe you can see what might be Venus – and thought to yourself, “that looks awesome, I should take a photo of it”, and you do, but the photo just looks like toothpaste on your best black top and you can’t understand why, then hurry to the Central Library tonight. Hurry!
Would you like to take photographs of the night sky? Not sure what to use or where to begin? John Field from the Wellington Astronomical Society will explore and explain how to use your Digital SLR camera and software to produce images that were previously beyond the scope of amateur photographers. Topics include what you need, how DSLR cameras work, what settings to use, how to polar align your mount using a DSLR, taking unguided images using a tripod, piggy-back and prime focus imaging through using a telescope, and image processing using freely available software. John will also include both the good, the bad and the ugly images he has taken to show what can go wrong and what you get when it all goes right
That’s happening tonight (May the 13th) at 7pm on the second level of the Central Library.
