Photo of the Day: Persistent Saturnian Auroras

Image Source: J. Clarke (Boston U.) & Z. Levay (STScI), ESA, NASA.

From NASA:

"Persistent Saturnian Auroras - Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's South Pole simultaneously as Cassini closed in on the gas giant in January 2004. Hubble snapped images in ultraviolet light, while Cassini recorded radio emissions and monitored the solar wind. Like on Earth, Saturn's auroras make total or partial rings around magnetic poles. Unlike on Earth, however, Saturn's auroras persist for days, as opposed to only minutes on Earth. Although surely created by charged particles entering the atmosphere, Saturn's auroras also appear to be more closely modulated by the solar wind than either Earth's or Jupiter's auroras. The above sequence shows three Hubble images of Saturn each taken two days apart."

Historic Present Superimposition

Image Source: Sungseok Ahn/Sony World Photography Awards via Yahoo.

Yahoo reports on a Gen Y South Korean artist, Sungseok Ahn, who superimposes past photographs over present views and then photographs the resulting scenes:

Sungseok Ahn's Historic Present questions the memory of past from the fast changing scenery of today. By overlapping a historical location with an old image of that exact place, he questions the way we treat our history and explores the dynamics.

Historic Present was short-listed for the 2014 Sony World Photography Award. The concept and technique are nearly identical to that of the pinterest group, Dear Photograph (see my blog post on that project, here). The inclusion of more people in Dear Photograph photos enhances the message of the superimposition.

For more photos from Historic Present, all reproduced from Sungseok Ahn's Website (here), see below the jump; copyright remains with the artist and photos are reproduced here for non-commercial discussion only.

New Blog Page

Mars Desert Research Station, Southern Utah (2013). Image Source: Mars Society.

Today, I am changing the blog's format and adding a new page to the blog. In the past, regular posts at Histories of Things to Come have featured longer pieces - commentaries, interviews and reviews - and short excerpts from interesting news items. Due to other work demands, I am mainly posting longer think pieces only on Sundays or Mondays. I have a separate page to cite exceptional pieces which reflect the themes of this blog:

Great Things Seen Elsewhere

However, there are also many links I find that are relevant, but don't need extended citation or reblogging in a post. I have set up a new page, which I will occasionally update:

News and Views Digest

This is a compendium similar to Graham Hancock's Daily Alternative News Desk.

ADDENDUM (7 January 2015): The News and Views Digest page is temporarily down due to an editing glitch in Blogger. When I get the problem sorted out the page will be restored.