The powerful new Astronomy.net search engine will be able identify any star or constellation from uploaded amatuer photos. You can take a picture of the night sky from almost any vantage point in the world, upload your photo to the search engine, and it will search through its massive database of constellations and stars and show you the details of what your picture contains. Additionally, your photo is also saved and used to expand the astronomy database. As more users upload photos to the search engine, it becomes even more powerful and precise.

The search engine uses astrometry, which is a branch of astronomy that studies star positions, motions, and measurements in space, to determine specific items in the photos. The stars in each photo are identified by taking 4 stars at a time and comparing that to their database of celestial positions and measurements. The search engine and database are currently in production and initial relase date is spring 2008.

Source: Yahoo News
Photo: Flickr

A 16-billion-pixel image of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting ‘The Last Supper’ has been made available online. High resolution art photography technicians at HAL9000 worked with restoration specialists in Rome to create a lighting system that would minimize damage to works of art. The 15-foot by 29-foot painting was shot in 9 hours with a Nikon D2X digital SLR using a AF-S Nikkor 600mm f/4D IF-ED II lens, and CLAUSS Rodeon VR motorized panoramic head. A total of 1,677 panoramic images were sewn together using two quad-core AMD Opteron processors, 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB hard disk. The image’s total size is 16,118,035,591 pixels (172181 x 93611) with a color depth of 16 bits per channel. See it here

Now this is an interesting (and somewhat funny) application that could be put to great use - Snapmania’s Tourist Remover. Using multiple photos of the same scene, Tourist Remover attempts to blend these together and remove unwanted interference from your captured moment in time. The online app is free, with up to 100 MB of online storage. Paid storage upgrades are available too. Hand-held shots will work ok, but shots taken wiht a tripod are better. Also, too many people in a photo are harder to get rid of. Via Photojojo

At just 1/18th of an inch wide, this is the world’s smallest CMOS chip with camera attachment being only 3.2mm. Shoots at a resolution of 328 x 250 with NTSC output. This is being developed by the British TDC, “a technical component distributor specialising in embedded components for wireless applications such as GSM, GPRS, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and ZigBee.” The Raw Feed

This is PhotoVu’s new PV1965w digital photo frame, and it will automatically resize your digital photos to 1440 x 900. It will also resize your bank account.
They claim this “is the industry’s first high-resolution, widescreen digital picture frame. [It’s] wireless, Internet-connected, and integrates with leading photo sharing web sites using RSS.” PhotoVu

Thanks Greg!

Tim Knowles created this Spy Box, and posted it from his studio in EC3 to a gallery in WC1 (a couple of miles from East London to Central London). It took a picture every 10 seconds through a tiny spy hole, and collected 6994 on it’s journey. He has now compiled the interesting ones into a slideshow which he is exhibiting alongside the box as an art piece.

 

The exploration of Chance and Process is core to my artistic practice. Akin to scientific experimentation and investigation, the results of my projects [although operating within carefully developed controls and parameters] are unpredictable and outside my control. It is the wind, postmen, the motion of a vehicle, or players of a game that unwittingly determine the outcome.

Shortly after launching thevideobay.org, Swedish ‘awesome-people’ at The Pirate Bay have now launched a new image hosting site. The coolest part about this site is the ability to upload anything you like, uncensored. This is not possible at sites like Photobucket - Boo.

BayImg supports over 100 file formats, they also let you upload ZIP and RAR. The current maximum file size of uploads is 100MB. We love you Pirate Bay!

San Jose based Tessera Technologies has developed a new miniaturization of the camera to be integrated into mobile devices, for a more compact fit and tinier devices all around. The technology is called ‘OptiML WLC’ and it cuts the size of conventional camera modules down by over 50%, and also cuts down on costs. Tessera will ultimately license the technology, not actually build any modules themselves.

From Tessara: “Wafer level techniques are used to build thousands of lenses on a wafer at the same time. Multiple lens wafers are then aligned and bonded at the wafer level using Tessera’s OptiML(TM) WaferStack(TM) technology. The need for costly manual focusing is removed due to the accuracy of the WaferStack(TM) process. The bonded lens wafers are then diced into individual lens modules, and each lens module is mounted on top of a packaged image sensor.”

This Flickr set shows what happens to a keyboard in a fire. The keys were far enough away from the heat to survive, but close enough to get turned into goo. Some of the shots look like pebbles, they look like a Flintstones keyboard.

This keyboard is a victim of suspected arson in a lumber mill a couple years ago. The keyboard itself was not on fire, and the underside of it is still in perfect shape…basically the heat of the fire above it melted all the plastic in interesting ways.

The Nikon 360 is a conceptual camera design by Ye Chen, which would allow people to easily take 360 degree panoramic pictures.

Based on an ergonomic cylindrical form lens, the 360 is a camera that allows you take an all-round picture. An angle indicator provides a gauge on the direction of the rotating head and is also an additional detail to provide the camera with a stronger and steadier feel while in operation. A built-in inclinometer indicates the horizontality of position prior to execution.

I think that there would be a market for a device like this. I can imagine that travellers could take them on trips, and come back with some really interesting images. Although, with a little work you can achieve this same effect with all sorts of applications.