The Cost of Offshore Drilling

The first photo is a Greenpeace ad. Both photos come from a Huffington Post slide show.

The Big Picture: The Year 2008 in Photographs

Just the other day I was touting the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture." Now they've begun compiling their photographs of the year. It's a big collection; 120 photos in three days. Here's Part One, the first 40.

The Big Picture: The Hubble Telescope Advent Calendar

One of the absolute coolest things on any newspaper's website is the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture." The Globe takes a newsworthy topic and tells the story with many high-quality photographs. The latest "Big Picture" photo essays tell the story of the Greek Riots (37 photos total), the Hajj and Eid al-Adha (41 photos total), and Scenes from Guantanamo Bay (30 photos total), but they are also currently working on a Hubble Telescope Advent Calendar (25 photos eventually), adding a new Hubble photo everyday from December 1 until Christmas. Here's an example...

You can see a larger version by clicking on the photo or see it in its full-sized glory by visiting the website. The caption describes this as "a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. 7,000 light-years distant from us, the soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometers tall." I like that -- "a stellar nursery."

If you're a photography nut or a news nut or both, you'll want to stick this site in your RSS reader or visit often. Good stuff!

Wow!

Tonight's full moon was the biggest and brightest of the year because the moon is currently at perigee, the closest it gets to the Earth. The difference between the moon at perigee and apogee, when it is the fartherest from the Earth, can be seen in the photo below from National Geographic...

No Kidding

A photo from David McNew/Getty Images illustrating this NY Times story about the California drought which has Governor Ahnold warning of severe rationing.

Not This Summer!

from Northwestern University's WWII Poster Collection

A Pot o' Gold

Make that two pots...



Taken by my son at the Chickamauga Battlefield, May 2008

Sleeveface

What a cool flickr pool. It's nothing but people holding album covers up in front of their faces, but some of them are very funny...

(photo by flickr user soulkombinat)

Photo of the Day: Death Star Galaxy

In case you haven't noticed, the Photo of the Day hasn't been very daily lately. I did practically promise that in the beginning though. My original plan was to post a lot of new pics with some old ones mixed in, but now, I'm down to mostly old ones. My old digital camera, the trusty Olympus, is about on her last legs. I don't know how old it is, but I bought it before almost anyone had heard of digital cameras and knew of their fabulous features. I paid about $450 for it, and now, you can get better features in a $100 camera. It's so old that Olympus no long sees a need to post the manual for it on their website. It's also bulky and heavy. But it's been with me through a lot. I wish I had back some of the many hundreds of photos I've lost on computers that I failed to back up. (Note to self: Time to do a backup soon.)

I'm hoping to remedy the camera situation shortly after the first of the year. I've got my eye on a Canon Powershot A570 IS. It's just a little point-and-shooter, but it's inexpensive and will fit my momentary needs. I just want a little camera that I can fit into a coat or jacket pocket or a small case so that I can have it with me at all times. I want to be able to just whip it out whenever or wherever. Then again, I might go with another Olympus. I've been with them a while; my last SLR was also an Olympus. Familiarity always cuts down on the learning curve. Well, there's still time to do more research between now and then. Maybe you have some recommendations???

In the meantime, I'm going to post more old photos, try to get in a few more shots with the trusty Olympus before retiring her, and throw in a shot every now and then from other sources that are not me.

On to the picture -- from one of those "other sources." Since the blog is called "Life, the Universe and Everything," it's probably overdue that I'm bringing up the actual universe. This is from NASA and shows a ray from a black hole destroying a galaxy. A galaxy! From the NASA website...

This composite image shows the jet from a black hole at the center of a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy, the first time such an interaction has been found. In the image, data from several wavelengths have been combined. X-rays from Chandra (colored purple), optical and ultraviolet (UV) data from Hubble (red and orange), and radio emission from the Very Large Array (VLA) and MERLIN (blue) show how the jet from the main galaxy on the lower left is striking its companion galaxy to the upper right. The jet impacts the companion galaxy at its edge and is then disrupted and deflected, much like how a stream of water from a hose will splay out after hitting a wall at an angle.

(Photo from NASA. Click photo for larger.)

Here's a link to an artist's illustration of what's going on here.