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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.”

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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.

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The aurora as seen through the “Little Planet” projection. Photo: Göran Strand

The dazzling display of the northern lights is one of the most valuable perks of living in the world’s colder regions. Outflows of hot plasma, streaming from the Sun, bombard the Earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic field lines snap. Atmospheric gases are are stripped of their electrons. The air is set aglow with ghostly greens and reds.

The northern lights are a favorite subject for photographers and even astronauts, but Swedish photographer Göran Strand has what may be the best chance for aurora-watching from outside the Arctic circle.

Drawing from timelapse images captured with a fish eye camera, Strand put together an interactive timelapse of the northern lights,  from more than 2,000 photos, says PetaPixel. The interactive even lets you change your perspective, switching from the normal “fisheye view,” which makes you feel like you’re there, to the more abstract “little planet view,” which lets you watch the entire display at once.

For a better idea of how the aurora are made, Space has a fairly detailed explanation:

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Hyperlapse photography is super hard to do, but the results are just incredible. Combining the sequential shooting of time lapse photography with carefully controlled camera movements—often over huge distances—hyperlapse photography transports you through stunning vistas at an unreal speed. Watching one gives you the sense of cruising along atop a speedy motorcycle, blowing through the landscape at top gear. Careful pans of the camera let you focus on a point of interest. Pointing dead ahead gives you that rush of speed.

But where hyperlapse videos are gorgeous, they’re also hard to pull off. The folks at Teehan+Lax Labs, says The Verge, released a free web tool to let you build hyperlapse videos using the images captured by Google’s street view cameras.

Google’s photos aren’t as stunning as you’ll get from a custom hyperlapse, but as the video above shows, the results can be quite spectacular.

We decided to speed not along a dusty open road, but through downtown Washington, D.C., a hyperlapse trip around the Smithsonian castle.

A hyperlapse of the Smithsonian castle, showing the free tool made by Teehan+Lax Labs

To make the app free and open to all without destroying Google’s servers with tons of requests for images, says PetaPixel, the tool has to make some concessions—you only get sixty photos for your video. But, if you know how to code, they’ve made the entire system freely available for you to tinker to your heart’s content.

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“Walking with a bucket in mouth; light-gray horse, Eagle” ca. 1884-1887 by Eadweard J. Muybridge Photo: George Eastman House / Google Art Project

Opened in 1949 in the mansion once owned by the man who in 1888 founded the Eastman Kodak Company, the George Eastman House is “the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography,” says PetaPixel. And last week the Google Art Project added high-resolution scans of many of the wonderful photos housed in George Eastman House to its growing collection.

Much as Project Gutenberg is trying to digitize the world’s books, the Google Art Project is seeking to digitize the world’s art. This is the first photography museum to join Google’s project, says Mashable.

The collection spans a range of photography styles and techniques, from early collotype prints and daguerrotypes to more modern photos of historical significance. George Eastman House:

The initial group of 50 Eastman House photographs on Google Art Project spans the 1840s through the late 20th century and a wide variety of photographic processes from the 174 years of the medium’s existence are represented. The variety of subjects featured include Frida Kahlo, Martin Luther King Jr., the first train wreck ever photographed, the Lincoln conspirators, the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx in the 1850s, and a portrait of photo pioneer Daguerre.

This isn’t the only new digital archive of significant photos. PetaPixel also points us to the newly revamped PhotosNormandie collection, an archive of thousands of photos from the late stages of World War II.

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