Smithsonian.com

Image: CarbonNYC

While blind people can’t enjoy photographs the same way sighted people do, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to take them. Or at least that’s the premise of this new app that helps blind people position their cameras better through sound cues.

Researchers recently asked blind and partially sighted people what the hardest part of getting a photo right was. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what their sampling of blind people wanted help with, the researchers made an app, which solves a few key problems that blind photographers have.

The first is locating the shutter button. In the app, there’s no button—an upward swiping motion on the screen takes a picture. The app also detects the number of faces it sees and speaks that number out loud. It also uses audio to help the photographer move the camera and get the subjects in focus.

To help photographers recognize the shots, the app records sound, too. New Scientist explains:

This is to help with photo organising and sharing – and is used as an aide-memoire as to who is in shot. The user can choose to save this sound file along with the time and date, and GPS data that is translated into audio giving the name of the neighbourhood, district or city the shot was taken in.

While sighted people might not understand why a blind person would want to take photographs, the results can be quite incredible. Take this gallery of photos taken by a blind woman. Sonia Sobertas, a blind woman who paints with light in her photographs, is part of the Seeing With Photography group of people who want to create images despite being blind. The New York Times explained Sobertas’s reason for taking photographs:

For seeing individuals, it may seem bizarre that Ms. Soberats dedicates so much time to an art she cannot fully appreciate. Why not a more tactile pursuit, like sculpting? But Ms. Soberats said she savored her work through the eyes of others.

“The more difficult the photo, the more interesting and the more rewarding when you complete it and it’s good,” she said. “To be able to realize and obtain something that at the end everybody praises, it’s very satisfactory.”

The researchers developing the app want to give their users that same experience and provide one more way for them to enjoy the same activities as everybody else.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Blind Photographer Paints With Light, Creating Stunning Images

Over the past few decades Lake Urmia in Iran has steadily dried up. Photo: Google / Landsat 

Since 1972, the U.S. has flown a series of satellites known as the Landsat program, a fleet of Earth-observing satellites that were tasked with taking pictures from space. Landsat’s gorgeous photos have been a favorite of the Earth-as-art crowd, and the satellites’ observations have provided an absolutely critical long-term record of how our planet is changing.

The development of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Landsat / Google

Today, Google put out the Earth Engine, a fascinating tool that showcases a scrollable, zoomable time-lapse of the entire planet as seen by Landsat over the decades. The Landsat photos only go back to 1984, but they show the dramatic ways in which the planet has changed in such a brief period of time. To help you get started, Google pulled out some highlights to look at, such as the drying of the Aral Sea or the deforestation of the Amazon. But the tool does show the whole planet (just the land, not the oceans), and there are many more cool things to be seen.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a more detailed look at this, the development of the oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Landsat / Google

But don’t bother looking for Antarctica, because it’s not included. (Sad.)

More from Smithsonian.com:

NASA Has Been Recording Earth’s Surface for 40 Years, and Today Is Its Last Chance to Keep That Going
Share a Bit of Earth’s Majesty With Every Letter You Send

In February 2013 Cassandra Brooks, a marine scientist with Stanford University, landed at McMurdo Station, a U.S. research station on the shores of Antarctica’s Ross Sea. For two months she worked on a ship, the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, cruising through the Antarctic sea. Brooks documented her life on the ship for National Geographic, and now she’s compiled two months of travels into a gorgeous time-lapse video. It gives a rare look at the onset of the fall season in one of the most remote places on Earth.

Don’t miss the end, where Brooks’ camera caught the ebb and flow of penguins going out to fish—a odd scene to watch in time-lapse.

Brooks’ cruise was intended to track what happens to all the phytoplankton that grow in the Ross Sea during the summer as the sun sets for the long polar winter.

This isn’t the only time-lapse that Brooks has put together, either. Here she shows what its like to do science from the ship as they cruise the Ross Sea.

H/T Deep Sea News via BoingBoing

More from Smithsonian.com:
Underwater Antarctica
68-Year-Old Explorer Plans to Cross Antarctica…in Winter

The eye of a dragonfly is made of tens of thousands of individual segments Photo: Rudi Gunawan

The first working compound-eye-style camera can’t quite see like a dragonfly. Dragonfly eyes are made of tens of thousands of individual light sensors, says biologist Robert Olberg to the blogger GrrlScientist:

“Dragonflies can see in all directions at the same time. That’s one of many advantages of a compound eye; you can wrap it around your head..The spherical field of vision means that dragonflies are still watching you after they have flown by….If you swing at them while they are approaching they’ll usually see the net coming and easily avoid it. They are awfully good at what they do.”

With 180 facets, not 30,000, the first camera designed to mimic insects’ compound eyes isn’t quite that perceptive. But the camera, created by optical engineers led by Young Min Song at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, does offer a 160-degree view of the world, say the researchers. ”It contains 180 artificial ommatidia, about the same number as in the eyes of a fire ant (Solenopsis fugax) or a bark beetle (Hylastes nigrinus) — insects that don’t see very well,” says Nature.

Photo: University of Illinois

The compound eye camera’s expansive field of view isn’t what makes it so special. Fisheye lenses are a favorite of photographers, and they already give you a 180-degree view of the world. The difference between the compound eye camera and a fisheye lens, says PetaPixel, is that having all those different individually-operating sensors means that the camera has “a nearly infinite depth of field. In other words, they can see almost all the way around them and everything, both near and far, is always in focus at the same time.”

A fisheye lens photo of the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Don DeBold

And, fisheye lenses cause a distinct distortion at the edges of the photos (the reason some photographers love the lenses). The compound eye camera doesn’t do that, says Popular Science.

With only 180 imaging sensor–lens pairs, the camera takes photos that contain 180 pixels. (An iPhone 4, by comparison, takes photos with 5 million pixels.) To work up to the full dragonfly-eye experience, the team will need to add more lenses and more sensors, something which they say “will require some miniaturization of the components.”

“The current prototype can only produce black-and-white, 180 pixel images,” says PetaPixel, “but future iterations could be game changing in the tiny camera game, with applications ranging from spy cams to endoscopes.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Gigapixel Camera Takes 11-Foot Wide Photos in 0.01 Seconds

A video stitched together from sequential photos of Saturn’s hexagon. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Saturn changes seasons ever so slowly, and in 2009, after seven years of winter, the planet’s orbit tipped, bringing sunlight once more to Saturn’s north pole. The changing season offered astronomers the first good look at the region since the Sun began to wane in the mid-1990s, says Wired.  And the break of first light provided a stunning view of a marvel that has baffled scientists since they first saw it in images captured by the Voyager spacecraft back in the 1980s, during Saturn’s most recent summer.

At the tip of Saturn’s north pole, there’s an oddly geometric hexagon: a wall of clouds with six distinct sides. Here’s what Voyager was able to document three decades ago:

Saturn’s hexagon as seen in the 1980s. Photo: NASA, seen through Universe Today

Wired, in 2009, explained what was so interesting about that figure:

“The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini project researcher at the California Institute of Technology, in a NASA release. “It’s a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter.”

The hexagon circles Saturn at 77 degrees north and is wider than two Earths. Nearly everything about the weather pattern is baffling. First, it’s unclear what causes the hexagon. Second, it’s bizarre that the jet stream would make such sharp turns. Earth’s atmospheric movements rarely display such geometric rigor.

But now, says NASA, improvements in satellite sensors and a bit better timing gave scientists working with the Cassini satellite a view into the very heart of the storm. There, they discovered something surprising: a gigantic hurricane.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Wired:

Though 20 times larger than an average Terran twister, the hurricane is very similar to the ones we see on Earth. Both have central eyes with low-hanging clouds surrounded by a wall of higher clouds spiraling around. Saturn’s hurricane winds are four times stronger than those on Earth, whipping by at 530 kmph (330 mph). Cyclones on our planet also tend to move around but Saturn’s polar storm has nowhere to go, remaining stuck in place for years.

As Saturn edges ever more into summer, an opportunity for scientific study of the storm—and hopefully more gorgeous photos—should emerge.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Saturn’s Polar Hexagon