January 31, 2012
Magnetic World
image by Rui Pedro, Adraga - Sintra - Portugal
Reducing Earth to a little world is now digitally doable, with the sky being everything else. But if star trails are in the sky when the panorama is warped by the little planet projection they turn into what looks like cosmic magnetic lines of force. They remind me of the gravitational waves that cosmologists hope to someday detect. If you look at the panorama that was transformed to make this LPOD you will see that the round ball in the middle is the beach that the pan was shot from. The irregular dark masses jutting into the sky are hills on the shore, with the bright yellow being lights and buildings in the distance. On the edge of the central ball are a few ghostly forms that appear to be astronomers with tripod-mounted telescopes. This is LPOD so the Moon must be present - do you see it? It was a crescent two nights ago when this panorama was taken and it shows as a bright, slightly bluish short trail just above the top of the ball. This little planet view is really what our experience as observers is - we are the center of a little space giving way to darkness in all directions, with the stars stretching infinitely in their hemisphere above.
Chuck Wood
Technical Details
28th January 2012. Images shot at 20sec. F3.5 ISO 800 with a canon EOS 30d and Canon ef-s 10-22mm at 10mm. The image shows a projection of a 360x180 panorama (full sphere) in a little planet projection. Made of 16 positions (each position = 15 minutes of 20 sec photos) and combined into a panorama and then projected to a "little planet".
