Dali House

As published by Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, photos taken over the years by American storm chasers Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.

The gold and sapphire of the Saudi desert, the Google Earth Community calls it. What a work of art this world it.

A group of Union Army officers summoned to a photo op with General William Tecumseh Sherman outside Atlanta, Georgia. Man, do they look fed up. Probably had better things to do, like laying the South to waste.

I came across these daguerreotypes on the Web will trying to find out why February 1865 was the only month in recorded history that didn’t have a full moon.

That’s right, last month I became the 247-millionth Internet user to waste his time trying to get to the bottom of what turned out to be a hoax. There was, of course, a full moon in February 1865, on the 10th, to be exact. But someone started a rumour and it boiled itself into one of these meme things that just keeps going around and actually hasn’t stopped yet, because someone alerted me to this “fact” just recently. I’m not sure why, but it seemed interesting at the time. See the rest.

Are these things really out there or are they just makin’ this stuff up? The alleged photo above is allegedly what Hubble was looking at on February 8, 2004. Compare that with what you were looking at on February 8, 2004. It’s the familiar view of V838 Monocerotis, with its expanding halo, that motorists in the vicinity of Chicago, Illinois, enjoy every day on their way home from work.

The Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104, what else? Putting on a hat dance in the early summer of 2003.

Hubble had just had its glasses cleaned by those nice people from NASA in 1999 when it looked around and saw the Eskimo Nebula, the glowing remains of a dying star.

A segment of Messier 17, a star factory also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, out in the industrial suburbs 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation. Ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars fashion the gas into photogenic sculptures every time tourists like Hubble come around with their cameras.

A pair of galaxies doing the tango 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. NGC 4676, whose nickname is “The Mice” because of the long tails of stars and gas, will be copulating soon, so we’d better give them some privacy.

Trey Ratcliff, who logs on to Flickr and elsewhere as “Stuck in Customs”, is goosing along the Photoshop adventure with some much-envied images that you can see on his own Flickr page and on his website.

The one above snagged the attention of 2Bangkok.com because it’s a spookily topical view of the city’s new Suvarnabhumi International Airport, which has become old very, very fast thanks to some pretty shabby planning.

The pic below is an enhanced view of Bangkok’s traffic “veins”, as Ratcliff calls them, looping thruways in the vicinity of the Victory Monument. Yes, those cars are moving, something you only see late at night in Bangkok.

The photo magician gets his HDR (high dynamic range) effects with a combination of Photoshop, Photomatix, FDRTools, Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, all of which I subsequently looked into and none of which I understand in the slightest.