Actual Photons Resolved from an Exoplanet Orbiting a Star

Brace yourselves for a nerd boner of epic proportions. Scientists have managed to resolve enough pixels to directly image an exoplanet orbiting a star 60 light years away. It’s a six second video (shorter than a Vine even) but its contents give rise to a promise of what is in store for the future.

Exoplanet Directly Imaged

How far away is Beta Pictoris b exactly? Sixty light years distant is roughly Continue reading

Featured Photographer: Emily Scaife and the Cosmic Crispies

One look around Emily Scaife’s website is all it takes to see that this photographer is full of great ideas. Scaife uses photography, film making and illustration in her work and she has an extraordinary skill in turning the seemingly mundane into a visual delight, creating optical illusions by isolating her subject matter through either a macro lens, microscope or scanner and tricking us into thinking we’re looking at something entirely different. My favourite of these series are the ‘Cosmic Crispies‘. Scaife has given them the byline ‘Meteorological breakfast’ and they certainly make a wonderful feast for the eyes:

CosmicCrispie1EmilyScaife-1303x1280

By photographing them in black and white against a pitch black background she makes them snap, crackle and pop in our brains as little asteroids (we’ve seen this type of imagery coming back from NASA – they’re not cheating and using Rice Crispies too are they?!). They are fascinating to look at and compare, who’d have thought each Crispie would be so different?

Here are some more from the series: Continue reading