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Thomas Vignaud of Marseille, France took this photograph, labeled Young fish dart by a jellyfish in the sea, in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2007. With it, he won the Natural World Category of Smithsonian magazine’s 5th Annual Photo Contest.

Have you taken an amazing photograph? Hurry up and enter our 7th Annual Photo Contest. The deadline is Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at 2pm Eastern Standard Time (EST).

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The Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille was the first to find this cluster of stars, in 1751 while on an astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). The Kappa Crucis Cluster (NGC 4755), which resides near the Southern Cross, received the nickname the “Jewel Box” during the next century, when astronomer John Herschel viewed it through his telescope and saw the stars were different colors—pale blue and orange. He wrote: “The stars which compose it, seen in a telescope of diameter large enough to enable the colours to be distinguished, have the effect of a casket of variously coloured precious stones.”

We now know that the cluster is about 6,400 light-years away from Earth and around 16 million years old. The stars in the Jewel Box all formed from the same cloud of dust and gas, are about the same age and have similar chemical compositions. The image above was taken recently with MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Scientists use clusters like this one to study the evolution of stars. (Image credit: ESO. Click here to find additional images of the cluster, including one from the Hubble Space Telescope.)

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ASTER image of Morenci open-pit copper mine in southeast Arizona (credit: NASA)

Splatter of colors
Seen high up from outer space
Pretty like a rainbow
–Natalie, age 8, Illinois

Mining doesn’t generally result in a prettier landscape, but it seems when you view the landscape through NASA’s ASTER instrument on the satellite Terra, beauty easily emerges. The image above is the Morenci open-pit copper mine in southeast Arizona. The mine is the largest producer of copper in North America. (The author of the poem is a Girl Scout; NASA partnered with some scouts last year and challenged them to write poems based on the agency’s images.) NASA highlights this and other images from its vast library in the NASA Images blog, which was begun earlier this year.

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The spiny sowthistle (Sonchus asper) is a flowering plant that grows up to three feet tall and sprouts small yellow flowers. A native of Europe, it’s an invasive weed here in the United States. If you found it in your garden, you’d pull it out or attack it with weedkiller.

Gerd A. Guenther of Düsseldorf, Germany, however, made the plant rather special when he put a section of the stem under a microscope and snapped this photo using a technique called darkfield illumination. The photo won second place in this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. (A gallery of winning images can be found at www.nikonsmallworld.com.)

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The National Science Foundation and the journal Science have held the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge each year since 2003. They award images in five categories (photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media), and the winners each year are truly wonderful. This image, “Autumn color, Estonian bog” by James S. Aber of Emporia State University, won first place in the Photography category in 2005.

With its intricate patterns-within-patterns and striking colors the winning photograph bears a distinct resemblance to a fractal. But scale back to about 150 meters above the ground and the sinuous landforms of Estonia’s Mannikjarve bog begin to reveal themselves. In the peat bogs of east-central and southwestern Estonia, the autumn works a change in the color scheme: Cotton grass turns gold, hardwoods in surrounding forests turn orange and red, and pine trees remain silvery green. The bog water, is sharp contrast, stays an acidic brown. Geologist James Aber of Emporia State University in Kansas recognized the potential beauty in the landscape and used a digital camera in an unusual setting to capture it.

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Humans have a huge impact on our environment, but visualizing the extent of that impact is rarely easy. Artist Chris Jordan, though, has attempted to depict it by creating beautiful images out of specific quantities of ordinary things, such as thirty seconds’ worth of U.S. aluminum can consumption (106,000) or the number of plastic cups used on U.S. airline flights every six hours (one million). Jordan writes on his web site:

[The images visually examine] these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

In his new series Running the Numbers II, Jordan ramps up his numbers to the global scale. The image above is Gyre, 2009, which measures 8 by 11 feet in real life and depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, the estimated amount of plastic pollution that enters the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic pieces in the image were collected from the Pacific Ocean, home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. On Jordan’s web site, he zooms in on the images so objects like a comb, toothbrush and hanger can all be seen.

Jordan is one of five artists currently documenting the Pacific’s plastic problem from Midway Island. He writes:

I envision our project not as being a bunch of professional media people tramping around the island with cameras; instead I hope it will be an emotional and spiritual journey by a deeply connected group of artists, to honor the the issues that Midway represents. Maybe it is not too ambitious to hope—if we can fully rise to the occasion—that we might be able to co-create a multi-media work of art that tenderly witnesses this middle point that humanity finds itself at right now. And in the eye of the storm—the apex of the Gyre—perhaps our collaborative efforts can create a container for healing that might have some small effect on the collective choice that is to come.

Image credit: Chris Jordan

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A trumpet flower caught as it unfolds (copyright Patsy Lieberman)

Summer is over–meteorologically speaking, at least–and the weather has finally cooled off here in Washington, D.C., but the flowers are still blooming prolifically. Patsy Lieberman (daughter of goSmithsonian and Around The Mall editor Beth Py-Lieberman) was talented and patient enough to capture this amazing image of a trumpet flower unfolding last week.

Have you taken your own amazing photo of the natural world? If so, you can enter it into Smithsonian’s 7th Annual Photo Contest (deadline: December 31, 1, 2009).

And if you’re here in Washington, you can check out the Smithsonian gardens (weekly tours are still available), the National Arboretum or, my favorite, the United States Botanic Garden to try to create your own photographic masterpiece or just enjoy the sight.

On May 29, 2006, hot mud began to erupt within the city of Sidoarjo, in eastern Java, Indonesia. The mud volcano (also known as the Lapindo mud flow, or Lusi) hasn’t stopped since then, spewing thousands of cubic feet of material every day. Nearly 2,000 acres of land have been covered with mud, burying roads, homes and factories and displacing almost 60,000 people so far. In the image above, you can see the mud contained by levees built to hold back the flow. (In this false-color image, vegetation appears red and mud is colored gray.)

Lusi’s origin was debated at first, and geologists wondered if an earthquake two days earlier 155 miles away might have triggered the event. But they determined that the eruption was actually triggered by oil and gas drilling just 650 feet from where the mud began to flow. The Indonesians, however, have ruled the incident a natural disaster and halted their criminal probe earlier this month.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

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