This is the largest true color photograph of the night sky ever created. It was shot by first time astro-photographer, Nick Risinger, a 28-year-old from Seattle. This is not just one view of the night sky but a 360-panorama composed from 37,000 individual photographs, taken by Risinger during his 60,000 mile trek across the western United States and South Africa.

“The genesis of this was to educate and enlighten people about the natural beauty that is hidden, but surrounds us,” Risinger said.

The project began in March 2010, when Risinger and his brother took a suite of six professional-grade astronomical cameras to the desert in Nevada. By June, Risinger had quit his job as a marketing director for a countertop company to seek the darkest skies he could find.

Every night, Risinger and his father set up the cameras on a tripod that rotates with Earth. The cameras automatically took between 20 and 70 exposures each night in three different-color wavelengths. Previous professional sky surveys (including the Digitized Sky Survey of the 1980s, which is the source for the World Wide Telescope and Google Sky) shot only in red and blue. Including a third color filter gives the new survey a more real feeling, Risinger said.

“I wanted to create something that was a true representation of how we could see it, if it were 3,000 times brighter,” he said.

Risinger sought out dry, dark places far from light-polluting civilization. Most of the northern half of the sky was shot from deserts in Arizona, Texas and northern California, although Risinger had one clear, frigid night in Colorado.

“It was January and we were hanging out in Telluride waiting for the weather to clear in Arizona or Texas,” he said. “Finally we realized the weather was hopeless down south, but it was perfectly clear where we were.” They drove an hour away, set up near a frozen lake, and sat in their car with the heat off for 12 hours as the temperature outside dropped to minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I would have loved to turn the car on for heat, but I was afraid the exhaust would condense on the equipment and make a shutter freeze or ice up the lenses,” Risinger said. “Certainly it was the coldest I’ve ever been, but I’ve still got all 10 toes and fingers.”

The southern hemisphere was captured in two trips to South Africa, not far from the site of the 11-meter Southern African Large Telescope. While there, Risinger and his father stayed with a sheep farmer who also watched the skies with his own amateur telescope.

Back in Seattle, Risinger used a combination of standard and customized astrophotography software to subtract noise from the cameras, stack the three colors on top of each other, link each picture to a spot on the sky and stitch the whole thing together. He taught himself most of the techniques using online tutorials.

Risinger plans to sell poster-sized prints of the image from his website and is looking for someone to buy his cameras, but otherwise has no plans to make money from his efforts. He wants to make the panorama available to museums and planetariums, or modify it for a classroom tool.

“When Hubble shoots something, it’s a very small piece of the larger puzzle. The purpose of this project is to show the big puzzle,” he said. “It’s the forest-for-the-trees kind of concept. Astronomers spend a lot of their time looking at small bugs on the bark. This is more appreciating the forest.”

A giant zoomable high-definition version can be seen here.
 
Via Wired
 

 
The newly married Duchess of Cambridge seemed more than eager to take up her Royal duties.
 

 
From the air, Holland’s tulips fields look like a fabulous work of abstract art. These beautiful photographs of tulip farms in Lisse are published in the Daily Mail, which writes:

Tens of thousands of tourists have flocked to catch a glimpse of these spectacular quilted farmlands in all their technicolour glory.

Many flower-gazers are so excited by the views that they have parked caravans along the bulbfields in a bid to soak up every last hue.

More than three billion tulips are grown each year and two-thirds of the vibrant blooms are exported, mostly to the U.S. and Germany.

The tulip season begins in March and lasts until August with several shows held across the country, but the flowers are undoubtedly at their most spectacular at this time of year.

The cultivation of flower bulbs began more than 400 years ago and today Holland produces more than nine billion bulbs every year, of which two thirds are exported overseas.

Evenly distributed, this number would allow for almost two flower bulbs for every person on the planet.

Their dazzling colours are thanks to the years in the 17th century when Tulipmania swept the globe and the most eye-catching specimens changed hands for a small fortune.

The country’s reputation for producing the colourful flower has grown so much that the area between Haarlem and Leiden is now regarded as “De bollenstreek” or the bulb district.

But like a rainbow, this colourful landscape is a short-lived phenomenon.

When the flowers are gone, the land will be cultivated for a rather more mundane crop of vegetables.

 

 
More colorful pictures of Holland’s tulip farms, after the jump…
 

 
The film was credited to ‘Anonymous’, which led some to think it was by Andy Warhol. Or perhaps Kenneth Anger. The mix of kitsch and beautiful imagery pointed to both. However, they were wrong. For years no one knew who had made Pink Narcissus. This was until the writer Bruce Benderson became obsessed with this subversively erotic film and decided to track down its director - James Bidgood.

Shot on Super-8, Pink Narcissus is a sumptuous film depicting the erotic fantasies of a gay male prostitute (Bobby Kendall), who visualizes himself in various homage to “gay whack-off fantasies”.

Bidgood arrived in New York in 1951. He worked as a female impersonator, hairdresser, set designer and then photographer. Bidgood started taking pix for Adonis and Muscleboy. At first he was disappointed with the results. He told the New York Times:

“There was no art,” Bidgood laments. “They were badly lit and uninteresting. Playboy had girls in furs, feathers and lights. They had faces like beautiful angels. I didn’t understand why boy pictures weren’t like that.”

Bidgood made his own erotic tableaux, which mixed beauty and kitsch. His first Watercolors presented a young man swimming through a fabulous, shimmering grotto—which he built and photographed in his cramped apartment. He told Butt magazine:

“Models were not that easy to find especially for the kind of work I was doing which called for more of the subject’s time than a pose or two wearing less than two square inches of jersey and some elastic and leaning against some fagelas elaborate mantelpiece. In the time I needed to do one shot they could turn ten tricks. And there weren’t all that many great beauties around willing to be photographed nude or semi nude in homoerotic situations. Remember this was before being gay and/or being a ‘male escort’ or pornography, quasi or otherwise, were as acceptable or mainstream as they are now.”

Bidgood created his own distinct style, which later inspired the careers of Pierre et Giles, and David La Chappelle.

Between 1963 and 1971, Bidgood worked on Pink Narcissus. It was shot in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Bidgood designed and made the sets, provided the make-up and costume, and used the neighborhood hustlers as his cast. It was an incredible undertaking, and one that eventually led his frustrated backers to take the film from Bidgood and finish it themselves. This was why Bidgood took his name off the finished film.  

“See, why I took my name off of it was that I was protesting, which I’d heard at the time that’s what you did…. I’d take my name off and then they’d go “Mr. Bidgood took his name off because…” But it turns out they kept me in the closet, and all you had to do was ask anybody who’s been in it and they’d say, you know, “Jim did this.” It wasn’t like a big mystery, but you would have thought, and then years later I was ‘outed’.”

 
Previously on DM

Early Gay Cinema: Jean Genet’s ‘Un Chant d’Amour’

 
This month, the Proud Gallery in Camden, London, presents Bob Marley and The Golden Age of Reggae, an exhibition of Kim Gottlieb-Walker’s brilliant and evocative photographs of Jamaican artists Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Burning Spear and Lee “Scratch” Perry.

During 1975 and 1976, renowned photo-journalist Kim Gottlieb-Walker and her husband, Head of Publicity at Island Records Jeff Walker, documented what is now widely recognised as the golden age of reggae. Kim took iconic photographs of the artists and producers who would go on to define an era and captivate a generation.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bob Marley’s death this May, Proud Galleries has worked with Kim Gottlieb-Walker to create an exhibition of candid and intimate portraits, including never before seen shots, of one of the most exciting moments in recent musical history with a warmth and intimacy born out of the respect between artist and photographer.

During her long career, Kim Gottllieb-Walker’s has documented many of the best known and important cultural figures of the past 5 decades, from Jimi Hendrix through Bob Marley to Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and John Carpenter. Kim sees herself as “the opposite of a paparazzi”:

“Rather than ‘take’ photos, the process is one of giving. The subject entrusts themselves to me and in return, I respect their privacy and their sensibilities and do my best to capture them at their most beautiful and expressive—a mutual act of giving. On the set, I see myself as a ‘recording angel’ who’s there to document what happens for posterity—a historian more than an artist—capturing the moments worth preserving.”

Bob Marley and The Golden Age of Reggae runs from 7th April - 15th May at the Proud Gallery, London.

Kim Gottllieb-Walker’s photographic book Bob Marley and The Golden Age of Reggae is available from Titan Books here.
 

 
Previously on DM

‘Stir It Up’: Video of Bob Marley and The Wailers rehearsal session

 
More superb photos after the jump….
 

 
Photographer Jeffery Martin has created the “world’s largest indoor photograph: a 40-gigapixel, 360-degree image of the hall that weighs in at 283 GB.”

But that’s not all, for the photograph is of Prague’s Philosophical Hall, a rarely seen, Baroque reading room in the city’s 868-year-old Strahov monastery library.

As reported in Wired Martin has taken nearly 3,000 pictures to create the one giant panoramic view of the Strahov library, which is released today on Martin’s website. The finished image is a

...a zoomable, high-resolution peek inside one of Prague’s most beautiful halls, a repository of rare books that is usually off-limits to tourists (a few of whom can be seen standing behind the velvet rope at the room’s normal viewing station).
Martin’s panorama lets you examine the spines of the works in the Philosophical Hall’s 42,000 volumes, part of the monastery’s stunning collection of just about every important book available in central Europe at the end of the 18th century — more or less the sum total of human knowledge at the time.

Martin got special permission from the library to pursue the project. He didn’t, however, get permission to wear his street shoes indoors. He’s complemented his fingerless gloves and down vest — it’s cold in here — with a pair of oversize, felt-soled slippers for the sake of the polished parquet floor.

To capture the images, the German-made GigaPanBot sends the camera on a pattern that starts at the very top of the library, going back and forth in rows, working its way downward over five days of shooting.

“I started from the ceiling, and by the time they kicked me out at 5 p.m. the first day, I had done maybe 20 percent of the hall,” Martin says. “So I hit pause and left everything right where it was until the next morning. That’s one advantage of shooting in an 18th-century library — my camera is the least valuable thing in the room.”

The next step: turning 2,947 individual shots into a single picture. It’ll take a day of mostly automated post-processing to correct colors and exposures from RAW image files.

“That dark corner and the bright ceiling are shot at the same exposure,” Martin says. “My goal is to get something that doesn’t have dark spots and bright spots — and also something that looks natural.”

During assembly of the massive panorama, Martin’s program will take more than 111 hours to stitch everything together.

“When you give it 10 pictures, it fits them together no problem,” Martin says. “But when you give it 3,000 images, there’s bound to be some issues.” After the initial layout, Martin will spend another 20 hours fixing a misaligned bookshelf, a few holes in the floor and other errors.

From inside the library, you can see why historians, scholars and travelers would flock here. A giant, four-volume set marked Musée Français, contained in a standalone, statue-topped wooden case, is believed to be one of only four extant copies. It’s a gift from Marie Louise, the second wife of Emperor Napoleon. (The French emperor is said to have had the rest of the print run destroyed because it contained evidence that certain Louvre treasures had been plundered from Italy.)

The room’s walnut paneling, gilt laurels and Escher-like inlaid marquetry make quite an impression. Beyond the rare tomes, guests who look carefully at the bookshelves might spot two hidden doors, masked with fake book spines, that lead to secret stairways — something you probably won’t catch in Martin’s panorama.

In other regards, viewing Martin’s web-based panorama might actually be better than an actual visit, especially when it comes to exploring the fresco high above the books. Completed in 1794, Franz Anton Maulbertsch’s trompe l’oeil ceiling depicts dozens of historical and religious figures, ranging from Noah and Moses to the French encyclopedists.

In real life, from 45 feet down, you might wish you could hit Shift to zoom.

Click here to see Jeffrey’s giant photograph.

The full article from Wired with photos can be found here.

A selection of Jeffrey’s 360-panoramic QuickTimes can be found on his site.
 

 

 
With thanks to Tara McGinley
 

 
DM pal David Flint has just uploaded a rare video interview with Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern from 1995, over on his always interesting site, Strange Things are Happening. As David explains: 

In 1995, your Strange Things editor began work on a project for the freshly-launched Television X, which was aspiring to be more than simply a soft porn channel. I convinced them that a documentary about ‘transgressive culture’ would be a good thing, especially as many of the leading lights in the field were going to be in London over the next few months. In the end, the higher-ups decided that such noble aspirations were foolish and returned to the T&A, but not before we shot this interview with Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch.

The pair were in London for NFT screenings of Kern’s films and the launch of his book New York Girls. This interview took place the day after the launch party, which is one reason why everyone is so tired! Also in attendance was photographer Doralba Picerno.

It was filmed by a TVX staffer on Hi-8, without any lighting - so was never going to be broadcast standard. It was several years before I was given the tape, and a few more after that before I could actually play it. But while the quality might be a bit murky, the content is, hopefully, worthwhile.I believe this was the first - and possibly only - time the pair were interviewed together.

 
Part two of the Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern interview, after the jump…
 
Via Strange Things
 

 
Michael Prince‘s photographs of the last days of the George Hotel, capture the faded elegance of this once famous location, now sadly replaced by anonymous shops. The pictures were taken in the spring of 1998, just months before the Hotel stopped accepting bookings and closed its swivel-doors for the last time. Michael is a Glasgow-based director and photographer, who has now collected these historic photographs together in a book called Goodnight George.

Situated at the top of the city’s Buchanan Street, the George Hotel kept its doors open for 162 years of business, offering accommodation to actors, performers, the rich and not so famous. Stan Laurel stayed here when he performed at the city’s Britannia Panopticon Theatre, just before he left for America, as did Cary Grant (then just Archie Leach) and later Joan Crawford. The hotel was known as the “nearest”, for it was handily situated between the main points of entry into the city, and ideally placed for all of Glasgow’s theaters. At one time it had over a 100 staff, including twenty-two chefs in its kitchens.

Things change, and by the late nineteen-seventies the George fell in to disuse, and its owner, Peter Fox, a former ballroom champion, let its rooms out to the homeless and unemployed. By the nineteen-nineties, the building’s faded grandeur proved an attraction to film-makers and promo directors. It was amongst these rooms that key scenes for Trainspotting (the scenes in the circular hotel room doubled for London, where the drug deal takes place) and The Big Man (Liam Neeson getting his rocks off) were filmed.

I lived here, on-and-off, from 1996, moving room-to-room, often as the hotel’s only tenant (apart from Mr Fox), until the George closed its doors in 1998. It was a great place to live, with 4 floors, six unused bars, a large kitchen, smoking rooms, a cocktail lounge, and a dance parlor, where a few club nights were had. After it closed, the interior was demolished and replaced with retail units, like Virgin Records. Where once I laid my head is now pop, and my feet, country and western, which is a shame, as the George should have been Glasgow’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel.

More of Michael’s work can be viewed here, and his book Goodnight George is available here.
 

 
More of Michael Prince’s photographs, after the jump…
 

 
Dunae Michals’ series of nine photographs Things Are Queer (1973) put together as a short film.
 
With thanks to Manon Bounouar
 

 
Richard Summers’ short film Warhol Multiplied is a neat Warholian conceit, in which multiple screens simultaneously run Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger. Summers is a photographer and artist who has a selection of other interesting projects on his website, including Same Spot Skies , a video diary focused on one section of the sky as shot from a window between 2006-2008.
 

 
Bonus clips of ‘Same Spot Skies’ and ‘Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger’ after the jump…
 

 
French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented the decline and decay of Detroit through its buildings and structures that were once source of civic pride (schools, churches, hotels, stations), but now “stand as monuments to the city’s fall from grace.”

Over the past decades, Detroit has suffered a post-industrial decline far worse than any other American city. The once booming city has seen its population fall from 2.5 million in the 1940s, to just over 1 million today, with 1 in 3 people unemployed.

Marchand and Meffre have published a book of their stunning and quite beautiful photographs. Each plate reveals a hidden history of Detroit, detailing an evolutionary process, where:

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires. This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time : being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.

Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

More images from this collection can be viewed here.
 

 
More Ruins of Detroit by Marchand & Meffre, after the jump…
 

 
Beautiful photographs of the Aurora Borealis, taken over Iceland between 2007 and 2010, as the Daily Telegraph reports

Chronological pictures show the cycle of the Northern Lights - which are visibly building up year-on-year towards what is expected to be a spectacular climax in 2012. Icelandic photographer Orvar Thorgiersson, 35, a software engineer from Reyjavik, is on a mission to document the growing annual intensity of the phenomenon. His most recent pictures show how bright the auroras have been this year.

Scientists expect the lights in 2012 to produce a spectacular fireworks display. The event will be caused by the Solar Maximum - a period when the sun’s magnetic field on the solar equator rotates at a slightly faster pace than at the solar poles. The solar cycle takes an average of around 11 years to go from one solar maximum to the next. The last Solar Maximum was in 2000 and NASA scientists have predicted that the next one in 2012 will be the greatest since 1958, where the aurora stunned the people of Mexico by making an appearance on three occasions.

Scientists have predicted that the Northern lights should be visible as far south as Rome in 2012. However, if the 2012 auroras are as big as expected, they could cause disruption to mobile phones, GPS and even the national grid.

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Beautiful Time-Lapse Photography of the Aurora Borealis over Tromsø

 
More photos after the jump…
 

 
Beautiful time-lapse photography of the Aurora Borealis over Tromsø, in Norway, by Tor Even Mathisen.

A webcam is available to view the skyline over Tromsø here.
 

 
National Geographic is holding its annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions on 30th November. Alan Taylor over at Boston.com has published an excellent selection of some of the entries so far, on his always wonderful The Big Picture.

National Geographic is gathering entries in categories of People, Place and Nature, and is showing some of these on their website for readers to rate them. Below is a small selection of this year’s entries.

If you would like to submit a photograph for the National Geographic Photo Contest, please check details here..
 

 
More entries from this year’s National Geographic Photo Contest after the jump…
 

 
These amazing color photographs were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii between 1909-1912, as part of a photographic survey of the Russian Empire, sponsored by Tsar Nicholas II. To achieve these color photos, Prokudin-Gorskii used a specialized camera, which captured three black and white images in quick succession, each with a different filter - red, green and blue. These images were then combined and projected with filtered lanterns to show almost true color images.

More of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii’s beautiful photographs can be viewed here.