Space, the Final Frontier
NASA has some gorgeous pictures of our universe: Solar System, Stars, Nebulae, Galaxies, Star Clusters - you name it, they've photographed it. Their extensive photo archive can give you a weekend full of browsing delight and a lifetime supply of screen backgrounds. Two of my favorites - the Eagle Nebula (shown above) and the Carina Nebula - remind me of uneartly sunsets. Their hues are similar to mortal dusk, but their tonal ranges and "cloud formations" are humblingly incredible.
Not to be outdone, the Jet Propulsion lab posted pictures of their mission to Saturn and Titan online here [Link].
While I was a student at CMU in 1999, the Robotics Institute created algorithms for the Mars Exploration Rovers. In Jan 2004, it created Personal Exploration Rovers and deployed them in museums across the country, in a well-executed publicity stunt. The original Mars Exploration Rovers, in the meantime, clicked some of the most expensive 1 Megapixel digitial photos ever taken by rover-kind, and beamed them back home. These photos were then stitched together (using CMU algos again) and posted on the Official NASA JPL Mars Rovers Website. The original images were taken by panoramic cameras in true color, across a large frequency spectrum, ranging from near infrared wavelengths to violet light. The original, unstitched images, before color modification, are available here, with a discussion of the process used obtain the final images.
