Cosmos Computed

Nothing beats a nice spring day on the slopes. The warm sun beams down, with its barely-filtered UV rays piercing through the thin air and frying all unprotected skin. The snow starts out icy, but before long it becomes soft and smooth, with slushy snow flying out at every turn. The weather can be really crazy - a couple years ago, Vail reopened for an extra weekend after closing when it was hit with a snowstorm that dumped 3 feet of snow. One of the best Spring skiing days I've ever experienced was nearly two months ago at Vail, a week before the closing date. Due to some lucky weather events, I experienced all three main types of snow conditions in a single day: ice, slush, and powder. The day started out like any other: hard snow covered the trails, frozen solid from the cold night before. Turns were difficult to make on this surface, as the skis could not carve on the ice. Clouds covered the sky. It was cold, but not frigid. View of the back bowls and Blue Sky Basin, taken from...

First off, apologies for this long-overdue post. I've had a busy month, and although I would have liked to post this within a few days of the beginning of 2016, I wasn't able to get it done until now. 2015 was a great year, and I think the images in this post will reflect that. In the previous year's image collection ( click here to view ), the images were only photographs. The image editing was restricted to cropping; I didn't need anything more. In this collection, though, I have drawings, CGI, and microphotography. These new types of images required more processing to prepare them for viewing. Of course, I used GIMP. I can't afford to pay for software. Instead of listing tons of images, I picked out the most important ones. I also tried not to add the images from previous blog posts; the majority of what follows is new stuff. I also attempt to analyze the images from both a scientific and artistic standpoint. Most likely, by the time most of you read this, you...

The Perseid meteor shower is coming up! After midnight on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, an observer under a dark sky may see up to 100 meteors per hour - an average of nearly 2 per minute. If you live in a city, the light pollution will wash out most of the meteors, so the countryside or mountains will be a much better place to watch them. Meteors start as small bits of material floating in space, usually dropped from comets that passed through the area. At this stage, they are called "meteoroids". When the earth passes through a cluster of these particles, they hit our atmosphere and burn up as meteors, and we have what's called a meteor shower. If you're looking up at the sky, and you see a streak of light zip a short distance and then disappear, this is a meteor. One of the best things about this particular shower is that the moon won't come out all night, so the sky will be darker than usual - making it possible to see more meteors than in most showers. If ...

A few days ago I found a field full of bright yellow flowers. It looked kind of nice, so I started taking pictures. My main goal was to get a photo which showed the vast number of flowers, without any extra information that might distract the mind. I ended up with this: There are probably a couple thousand flowers in that photo. I was amazed at how many flowers there were. Anyway, as I was photographing the flowers (probably Perky Sue), I noticed that there were a lot of bees in the field, buzzing from flower to flower and (presumably) collecting nectar and pollen. So I took some photos of the bees. Of course, I didn't stop at that. Among other photos, I got a photo of a giant dandelion (actually called a Salsify, although "Goliath Puffweed" would suit it way better): A cactus flower: A flowering yucca ( not to be confused with yuca, also known as cassava, which is toxic when raw, and grows in South America): And daisy fleabane, which is a weird name for a cool flower: Y...

I recently created a couple of nature-themed animated GIFs. (Click the images to view larger.) The first image is a blossoming tree. I thought the tree looked pretty, but I realized that part of the beauty came from the gentle swaying in the wind. So I decided to animate the image. To do this, I snapped a quick series of photos. Then, I used GIMP to reduce unwanted noise and scale them down. Finally, I saved the images as a looping animated GIF. The result takes a while to load, and seems kind of jerky, so I'm not sure whether I like it. My next image is a late snowstorm. In many snowstorm photos it is difficult to tell the difference between the falling snow and the already-fallen snow. Again, an animated image seemed necessary. In this case, however, a series of photos wasn't quick enough, so I took a video instead. I then grabbed a sequence of 10 still frames from the video. Again using GIMP, I scaled them down and saved as a GIF. The problem with animated images like this ...

In this post, I'm including some of the photos of snowflakes I've taken over the past few days. As usual, these close-ups were taken using my macro setup . I did not edit the photos in any way. New posts every month - subscribe for free !

I collected 12 of the highest-resolution, best-quality photographs of nature I've taken over the past few years, cropped them to highlight the important parts, and then applied JPEG compression. Now I'm releasing them for my blog readers to enjoy as a desktop background. To download as a .zip file, click here . Note that the photos shown in this post are low-resolution previews. If you have any questions about the wallpaper, please comment! New posts every month -  subscribe for free !