Photographs taken from the space shuttle Endeavour, August 2007.

Further to this and this, here’s a third clip from the BBC’s Planets series, taken from the episode Moon. Here, Farouk El-Baz explains how Apollo astronauts honed their geological skills – and how a sizeable piece of Flagstaff, Arizona, was given a radical lunar makeover.

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More background here and here. The entire Planets series can be downloaded here.

Further to Friday’s post on The Planets series, here’s another short extract, taken from the episode Atmosphere. In it, we follow Joe Kittinger’s 1960 balloon ride to an altitude of 103,000 feet (20 miles / 32 km), where, technically, he became the first man in space. Thanks to automated cameras, we also follow Kittinger’s unorthodox – and perilous – return to Earth. Extraordinary.

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Parts one through six of The Planets can be viewed online here.

Related. And. Also. (H/T, The Thin Man.)

Via The Thin Man, here’s an extract from the first episode of the BBC’s acclaimed documentary series, The Planets. Broadcast in 1999, the series remains one of the most lavish and comprehensive accounts of astronomical discovery and space exploration, with previously unseen archive footage, most notably from Russia. There’s also a memorable score by Jim Meacock. Recommended.

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The first two episodes, Different Worlds and Terra Firma, can be viewed in full and downloaded here. Subsequent episodes should be posted over the next few days.

Sponsor my research. Those orbital weapons platforms won’t build themselves. 

The Tungurahua volcano, Ecuador. Photographed by Patrick Taschler. 

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Via Cognitive Daily, here’s the famous Dragon Illusion, one of the more potent variations of the Hollow Face Illusion. 

Make your own. Thrill your friends. Impress women. More.

Here’s footage of British troops unwittingly testing LSD, circa 1953/54. The experiments were supposedly to determine the drug’s value as a “non-lethal incapacitating weapon.” Hilarity ensues. One soldier attempts to feed the birds by climbing a tree. “The efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired.”

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Related. And.

A form of ‘content-aware’ image manipulation has been developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir of Israel’s Efi Arazi School of Computer Science. Their prototype software allows images to be dramatically resized without scaling or cropping. By assigning levels of importance to component parts of an image, the software is able to shrink or stretch images while leaving key features intact and in proportion, and all in real time.

More. And. Related. Also. (H/T, Protein Wisdom and The Thin Man.) 

If yesterday’s ephemera entry on ways to visualise data was of interest, there’s more on the subject here, here and here. The data being visualised covers everything from earthquake activity and email flow to human trafficking. 

The Fidg’t visualiser is particularly lovely. More. And. Related, this, this and this. (H/T, 1+1=3.) 

In his 2006 TED lecture, Professor of International Health, Hans Rosling, shows that, contrary to rumours, the end is not yet nigh. Complex global trends – in life expectancy, child mortality and poverty – are revealed in ways that may surprise. See the world changing. Marxists please take note.

Professor Rosling’s follow-up lecture, filmed in March 2007, can be viewed here. More here and at TEDblog.

(H/T, Vitruvius.)