staceythinx:

Check out Wired’s gallery In focus: European Southern Observatory celebrates 50-year anniversary for some amazing images from one of the world’s leading astronomical institutions. 

ikenbot:

Milky Way Shows 84 Million Stars in 9 Billion Pixels

Side Note: The two images shown above are mere crop outs from ESA’s recent hit: The 9 Billion Pixel Image of 84 Million Stars. These two focus on the bright center of the image for the purpose of highlighting what a peak at 84,000,000 stars looks like.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500×81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels.

It’s actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory’s VISTA survey telescope, the same camera that captured the amazing 55-hour exposure. Three different infrared filters were used to capture the different details present in the final image.

The VISTA’s camera is sensitive to infrared light, which allows its vision to pierce through much of the space dust that blocks the view of ordinary optical telescope/camera systems.

source

fleeckr:

Alien storm by Jon Bowles

nickdrake:

Alfred Hitchcock.

1880-1910:

Circular designs from Combinaisons Ornementales by M.P. Verneuil, George Auriol and Alphonse Mucha. 

fleeckr:

imprecise:Sven Broeckx

Oxidized tentacle ring, Penny Skemp

While filming To Have and Have Not, Humphrey Bogart became enchanted with Lauren Bacall. This became apparent, according to Bacall, about three weeks into the shooting of the picture. Immediately it presented problems, because Bogart was still married to Mayo Methot, who was as watchful and as jealous as ever. A few weeks earlier, when he was congratulating Bacall on her screen test (which consisted of the famous ‘If you want me, just whistle’ scene), his prescient comment had been ‘We’ll have a lot of fun together,’ but for a while it seemed as if fun was the last thing on their agenda: they would drive their cars to secluded residential streets and sit holding hands and talking, or write each other long, ardent, frustrated letters. And when shooting on To Have and Have Not was over, they had no further excuse for being together. Fortunately fate was quick to step in, in the kindly guise of Howard Hawks and Warners executives, who were so pleased with the on-screen chemistry between the two stars that they decided to waste no time before pairing them again. In October 1944 they began filming their second film The Big Sleep where they resumed their affair with a vengeance.