Tag Archives: panorama

Week-end in Strasbourg

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We had some great time this week-end in Strasbourg (wikipedia) with my wife and son. Always a great pleasure to go there, as it is a great city, and also because we have studied there for a while ;-)

We had two great meals:

  • a lunch at an Italian restaurant called “La Grappa”, really great. Good atmosphere and service, everything fresh, reasonable price.
  • a wonderful dinner at “La cuiller à Pot” (no error ;-), a gastronomic restaurant. Really worth a try!! And not just because we know one of the owner ;-) The Chef was nominated as a “Young Talent 2009” by the Gault & Millau. Have a look:

[…] Numerous gourmet guides have noticed the restaurant, the cuisine being daring, and the mixes being done with “opposites attract” as a motto. A star is born…
Here is Gault Millau Young Talent that really charmed ideal gourmet. Ideally located, decorated with a lot of taste and personality, this gourmet address is on the rise and it will no doubt surprise you thanks to an ideal gourmet menu composed according to the season, with a thousand and one surprises in store for you. […]

Besides the meals and shopping, I could test a bit more my new Canon EPS 5D MarkII, this time with my “old” wide-angle lens (Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0). I could really feel the advantage of the “full-frame” for the first-time. Great!

Full gallery here.

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (10) – February 2009

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Just a precision based on some of your comments here and there: no, I am *not* in Saint Barth right now. Actually the next stay there is planned for February 2010. Unfortunately, still some months to wait. On the other side, we are lucky enough to be able to go there again ;-)

As a reminder, I am re-publishing parts of my last Saint Barth portfolio from February 2009!

No fear, you will know when I will be again “back home” :-)

 

Lorient

 

View of Saturn’s rings during equinox

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via CICLOPS

[…] Seen from our planet, the view of Saturn’s rings during equinox is extremely foreshortened and limited. But in orbit around Saturn, Cassini had no such problems. From 20 degrees above the ringplane, Cassini’s wide angle camera shot 75 exposures in succession for this mosaic showing Saturn, its rings, and a few of its moons a day and a half after exact Saturn equinox, when the sun’s disk was exactly overhead at the planet’s equator.

The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun’s angle to the ringplane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and to cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. […]

The images comprising the mosaic, taken over about eight hours, were extensively processed before being joined together. First, each was reprojected into the same viewing geometry and then digitally processed to make the image “joints” seamless and to remove lens flares, radially extended bright artifacts resulting from light being scattered within the camera optics. […]

The images were taken on Aug. 12, 2009, beginning about 1.25 days after exact equinox, using the red, green and blue spectral filters of the wide angle camera and were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained at a distance of approximately 847,000 kilometers (526,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 74 degrees. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 miles) per pixel. […]

Hubble Space Telescope is back in business

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via HubbleSite and cnet

The Hubble telescope is again working well. The first images were published by the NASA. Simply extraordinary!

The Hubble Space Telescope got back to business this summer after an intensive repair and upgrade mission in May by a crew aboard the space shuttle. This week, an exultant NASA praised the work done by the astronauts–“Bottom line, these professionals left Hubble as a new state-of-the-art telescope,” said Ed Weiler, the agency’s associate administrator for space science–and released a series of photos that offer fresh and spectacular glimpses of the interstellar realm.

Three fantastic examples of these new “shots”.

Butterfly Nebula

This image, taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3, shows the Butterfly Nebula (or Bug Nebula, cataloged as NGC 6302), at the center of which is a dying star that once had five times the mass of Earth’s sun. The wings of this butterfly are actually gas heated to 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit and traveling faster than 600,000 miles per hour, NASA says. The nebula is some 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, within the Milky Way galaxy. The outer edges of the butterfly wings arise from light emitted by nitrogen, while the white areas show light emitted by sulfur.

Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 

Galactic wreckage

 

The Wide Field Camera 3 captured this still life of Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies. (It’s also known as Hickson Compact Group 92.) At the top right is NGC 7319, a barred spiral, and those blue and red specks are clusters of thousands of stars.

At the center are two galaxies that appear from this perspective almost as one, where there’s “a frenzy of star birth” going on. (For the record, they’re NGC 7318A and NGC 7318B.) At bottom left is NGC 7317, which NASA describes as “a normal-looking elliptical galaxy.”

At upper left is the dwarf galaxy NGC 7320, where the blue and pink dots represent bursts of star formation. It’s actually much closer to Earth (40 million light-years away) than the other four galaxies here (290 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus).

Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

 

A huge pillar of star birth

A “huge pillar of star birth” taking place in the Carina Nebula is seen here in two images from the Wide Field Camera 3, the top one taken in visible light and the bottom one in infrared. In the infrared image, only a faint outline of the cloudlike pillar remains, allowing astronomers to see fledgling stars and other details more clearly.

At the center of each image is an infant star that is shooting out a jet of cosmic material to the left and to the right. The jets are thought to be moving at speeds of up to 850,000 miles an hour.

Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team