Nick Risinger, an ama­teur astronomer from Seat­tle, quit his day job last year, packed his bags and cam­eras, and began a 60,000 mile jour­ney, mov­ing across the Amer­i­can West and down to the west­ern Cape of South Africa (twice). His voy­age would end with a 5000-megapix­el pho­to­graph of the entire night sky, pro­duced from 37,440 sep­a­rate expo­sures, and it yields a stag­ger­ing 360-degree view of the Milky Way. Even bet­ter, the image now lives online in an inter­ac­tive for­mat, giv­ing you the abil­i­ty to wan­der through the cos­mos.

For more on this, be sure to vis­it Pho­topic Sky Sur­vey. Here Risinger gives you the per­son­al and tech­ni­cal back­sto­ry on his project, and also gives you the chance to pur­chase pho­tos, or even lend finan­cial sup­port to the sky sur­vey.

via The Mail Online

We turned off the lights and switched to the biggest mon­i­tor in the house, to get the full plan­e­tar­i­um effect of this won­der­ful web­site. It’s called the Solar Sys­tem Scope, and gives you a chance to observe space from with­in it, rather than duti­ful­ly study­ing it in a text­book or on a screen.

Click­ing on the tele­scope icon to the left lets you tog­gle between three dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives:  The helio­cen­tric view, with the plan­ets and stars spin­ning around you; the panoram­ic view, which repli­cates the feel­ing of watch­ing the skies from the Green­wich obser­va­to­ry; and, since after all we are the cen­ter of the uni­verse, the geo­cen­tric view, which puts the rest of the cos­mos firm­ly in their place, orbit­ing the earth.

In a sec­tion called “What’s Next” the site’s cre­ators (who are you, mys­tery design­ers?) tell us that they are work­ing on a kid-friend­ly ver­sion of the site as well, but  we’re not sure that’s even nec­es­sary.  When we let a curi­ous 8‑year-old try it out ear­li­er today, it took us about an hour to get our com­put­er back.

via Metafil­ter

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

Next year, NASA plans to put an end to its 30 year old space shut­tle pro­gram. Since 1981, the pro­gram has launched five space shut­tles (Colum­bia, Chal­lenger, Dis­cov­ery, Atlantis, Endeav­or) into orbit, or 132 flights in total. Here, Matt Melis, a NASA engi­neer, has com­piled what he calls the “best of the best, state of the art” video pro­duced by the space shut­tle pro­gram. And he has stitched it into a 45 minute trib­ute video, called Ascent, that nar­rates the anato­my of a space launch, from start to fin­ish. A great visu­al way to com­mem­o­rate the space shut­tle pro­gram, and the peo­ple who filmed it… NOTE: The video remains dark for the first nine sec­onds.

via @eugenephoto