Endeavour pilot Terry Virts opened the windows of the newly installed cupola one at a time early Wednesday, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick an early look into the International Space Station's room with a view that they had helped install.
The cupola's fully opened windows look down on the Sahara Desert in this image that was 'tweeted' from space by JAXA astronaut and Expedition 22 flight engineer Soichi Noguchi.
natural architecturethe natural environment still manages to fill us with a sense
of awe and amazement. despite the amount of scientific
knowledge mankind has gathered, nature still holds great
mysteries that we may never be able to unravel.
this complexity has continually daunted man. in frustration, we
try to control nature by enforcing order. as a result,
we have distanced ourselves from the earth, even though
our survival is completely dependent on it. we are now trying
to regain our close connection to nature.there is an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind's
desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment.
referred to as 'natural architecture', it aims to create a new,
more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by
exploring what it means to design with nature in mind.the roots of this movement can be found in earlier artistic
shifts like the 'land art' movement of the late nineteen sixties.
although this movement was focused on protesting the
austerity of the gallery and the commercialization of art,
it managed to expand the formal link between art and nature.
this has helped develop a new appreciation of nature in all
forms of art and design.the 'natural architecture' movement aims to expand on 'land art'
by acting as a form of activism rather than protest. this new
form of art aims to capture the harmonious connection we
seek with nature by merging humanity and nature through
architecture. the core concept of the movement is that
mankind can live harmoniously with nature, using it for our
needs while respecting its importance.the movement is characterized by the work of a number of
artists, designers and architects that express these principles
in their work. the pieces are simple, humble and built using the
most basic materials and skills. because of this, the results
often resemble indigenous architecture, reflecting the desire
to return to a less technological world. the forms are stripped
down to their essence, expressing the natural beauty inherent
in the materials and location. the movement has many forms of
expression that range from location-based interventions to
structures built from living materials. however all of the works
in the movement share a central ethos that demonstrates a
respect and appreciation for nature.these works are meant to comment on architecture and provide
a new framework to approach buildings and structures.
they aim to infuse new ideas into architecture by subverting
the idea that architecture should shelter nature. instead,
the structures deliberately expose the natural materials used
in the building process. we see the branches, the rocks and
all the materials for what they are. we understand that these
structures won't exist forever. the materials will evolve over
time, slowly decomposing until no evidence remains.
these features are intentional, provoking viewers to question
the conventions of architecture. the designers aren't suggesting
that architecture must conform to their vision, they are just
providing ideas that they hope will inspire us all to rethink the
relationship between nature and the built environment._____________________________________________________
natural architecture (the book)
author: alessandro rocca
publisher: princeton architectural press
year: 2007
ISBN: 1568987218
ISBN:13 9781568987217designboom rating:
a collection of works reflecting the ideas of this movement
have been compiled into a book written by alessandro rocca
(architect and architecture critic and a professor at the
milan polytechnic). the book, due out in early november 2007,
features sixty-six projects from 18 artists and architects
by way of 250 photos and illustrations. each project reconsiders
designing with nature in mind. projects by olafur eliasson,
patrick dougherty, nils-udo, ex. studio, edward ng, n architects,
and many others. more infonote:
the work featured in this book was first published
in 2006 in the book 'architettura naturale'
(italian language) by 22publishing_____________________________________________________
designboom ratings:
I found this article about a year ago, and its subject continues to bubble just beneath the surface of my consciousness, emerging unexpectedly every once in a while...
One late night in 2007, Rogelio Bernal Andreo and his wife were driving down Highway 1 along California’s Lost Coast, when his wife opened the moon roof. What spread out above them looked nothing like the mauve sky near their Sunnyvale home.
“It was like the Milky Way was in front of us,” said Andreo, a former early eBay employee, who runs a Spanish-language internet company. “It looked like it was gonna fall on us.”
He pulled out his digital SLR camera and spent two hours trying to capture the vast galaxy. When he got home, he downloaded the photos, and caught the astrophotography bug.
“I started to look on the internet and see all these pictures, really gorgeous pictures,” Andreo said. “I said, ‘How do people do this?’”
Two years of intensive study, rigorous practice, and perhaps $10,000 of equipment later, he knows. And he let Wired.com in on his process. Step-by-step, we’ll break down how he went from the black-and-white star scene below to the mind-blowing space photo above.
Thanks to cheaper high-quality digital cameras and editing equipment, creating beautiful images of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters is now within the reach of anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend.
So, we live in a golden age for space photos, but looking at the technicolor images of what appears to the naked eye to be a fairly bland sky, we find ourselves asking: Does it really look like that?
As we find in this behind-the-scenes look at the making of a mind-blowing space photo, the answer is yes — but just not to your eyes, which are pretty poor sensors, compared with purpose-built astrophotographic equipment.
But that doesn’t mean the photos aren’t “real.” Most astrophotographers have an ethic: They won’t add color or lasso just a part of an image for editing. They can only bring things out of the data, not add them. The photos are often processed in Photoshop, but what they do is the opposite of falsifying the visual record. Astrophotographers are using digital-editing tools to find the truth in the noisy data that are the heavens.
“The stuff up there is really dim,” Andreo said. “The good thing is that the camera records all that and the trick is to bring it out.”
The first step in getting a good space photo is picking a spot without light pollution from cities. In northern California, Andreo prefers Lake San Antonio, Henry Coe State Park and Fremont Peak, depending on how far he wants to drive.
His equipment list is long. He packs a Takahashi telescope, Takahashi mount, tripod, SBIG STL11000M camera, adapters, cables, deep-cycle marine batteries, an Asus eee laptop, food and coffee of course.
This photo is how the process begins. It’s the first of 11 black-and-white exposures that he’ll make. The field of view is just the left third — the area around the bright blue stars of Orion’s belt — of the completed panorama at the top of the page.
“This is just one shot, a 15-minute exposure,” Andreo said. “That’s how it comes out of the camera. The original size of the picture is like 20 megabytes.”
Of course, he shoots in RAW format with no compression to maximize the amount of data the images retain.
Now, the processing begins. Andreo takes his 11 exposures and “stacks” them in
PhotoshopDeep Sky Stacker, one on top of the other. Then, he averages their data to screen out the noise. Each exposure has a set of random noise in some subset of pixels. By combining them, the good pixels outweigh the bad pixels and you end up with a less noisy image.“The stuff that’s really up there is going to stay, but the noise — because it was random — is going to disappear,” he said.
At this stage, he also does background calibration, which tends to brighten the image and make it a little “creamier.”
Here, Andreo has started to “push the histogram,” as astrophotographers say.
“You push up or down the low levels of the image and the high levels of the image and more data starts to show up,” he said. “It’s the first thing that most people are going to do. Once you stack your images, then adjust your histogram a little to see how much stuff is really there.”
Here, more stars are obviously apparent and the creaminess has gone away with the processing for greater contrast. Next comes the color.
After he shoots an area of the sky with the monochrome, high-resolution filter, he switches to separate red, green and blue filters. He goes through the same process for each color component as he did for the black-and-white image. He takes multiple exposures, combines them, and does background calibration.
“It’s just red, green and blue combined and slightly stretched to bring out all the detail,” Andreo said. “You start to see more of pretty picture, basically.”
Here, Andreo has draped the color data onto the more detailed luminance image.
“I take the RGB that you saw from the previous image, and I put it on top of the luminance,” Andreo said, “but I don’t want the details, I just want the color information.”
Once that’s complete, he pushes the histograms some more or perhaps adjusts the levels in the image to bring out the details. Some of the artistry comes out in this stage.
“Because there is a lot of creativity, with the same set of raw data, two different people are going to come up with different things,” he said.
The last step was simply to rotate it vertically because he just “liked it more this way.” After all, the number of targets for amateur astrophotographers is fairly limited. Framing is a key component of standing out.
“I’m hoping that my final picture will escape mediocrity,” he said. “It may not be the best you’ve ever seen, but at least it’s not just one more.”
Later, that rotation turned out fortuitously when a friend saw the image and suggested he combine it with photos he’d taken of an adjacent region of the sky.
Working with a program called Registar that helps photographers join their photos by identifying the common stars in different images, he stitched the images together. It required rotating and cropping his original Orion belt, but when the mosaic was finished, it was absolutely breathtaking. Last month, it was selected by NASA as the agency’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 18th.
The image certainly traveled a long way from its initial incarnation to the finished product, but is the first image any more real than the last? Does adding dozens of exposures together and “pushing the histogram” add or subtract from the reality of the image?
After stepping through the transformation, we’re not convinced either way, but we’re sure glad that someone takes pictures of space that look like pieces of the heavens.
Images: Rogelio Bernal Andreo.
See Also:
- More on Mindblowingspacephotos
- Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun
- Photo: Space Shuttle Crosses the Sun
- Spectacular Space Photo of the Christmas Tree Cluster
- Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama of the Milky Way
- The Pinwheel Galaxy Captured in Dazzling Color
- Zoom In on Lagoon Nebula with Super-High-Res Image
- Details of Galactic Core Revealed in X-Rays
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
The making of heavenly beauty...
You’ve undoubtedly seen the smudge of the Orion Nebula hanging just below his belt thousands of times, but the most beautiful image yet of the celestial body was just released Wednesday.
The European Southern Observatory’s new VISTA telescope’s enormous field of view allows it to image the entire nebula at once. It’s been designed to capture near-infrared light. The longer wavelengths of light in that part of the spectrum allow rays to pass through dusty space without being scattering.
The Orion Nebula is located about 1,350 light-years from Earth. The cloud of gas and dust is a nursery for young stars. The red blobs in the features near the center of the image are young, growing stars that are hidden by dust in visible light.
VISTA was just placed into service late last year, so we can expect many more beautiful near-infrared images as it conducts its survey of the sky.
There are detailed close-up shots below, too.
Image: ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. The 341 MB XXXL version.
See Also:
- The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo
- Slick NASA iPhone App Puts Space in Your Pocket
- Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
The new VISTA infrared telescope is coming online... more images to follow!
