Click full screen, sit back, and turn the sky into a thousand diamonds with this beautifully ethereal time lapse captured in northern Michigan by Shawn Malone. This is North Country Dreamland. 

Ten thousand frames of stellar wonder stitched into a few minutes of earthly wow. Plus a special visit from a blue heron!

Keep looking up, and stay curious.

More of my favorite time lapse videos here and here.

Epic timelapse video: Comet PanSTARRS dances with auroras, by Babak Tafreshi. Watch the brilliant comet fall behind the mountains before the sky is filled with swirling auroral emissions above Norway.

Your end-of-week moment of zen, best in HD/full screen.

Bonus: The science and beauty of auroras, one of my YouTube creations.

(via National Geographic)

Source: National Geographic

Time-lapse of a particularly intense aurora borealis display on March 17, 2013 as captured in fish-eye, full-sky, time-lapse glory by Swedish astrophotographer Göran Strand.

Ohhhh man I love this stuff. How often do you get to see an aurora in full-sky mode?!? This is exactly the kind of skyporn that should have made it into my Auroras YouTube episode.

(via Boing Boing)

Source: Boing Boing

Comet Panstarrs captured in gorgeous time-lapse above the skies of Boulder, CO by Patrick Cullis. Lovely stuff.

Comets are mysterious frozen chunks of stellar and planetary debris, these dirty snowballs that wander in darkness until their tails are blown bright and wide by solar winds. Some follow paths so random and eccentric that they may pass a star only once, or perhaps not at all, instead floating through interstellar space, never to be known. But for those fleeting moments, like Panstarrs’ current passage, they are like icy candles lit for our enjoyment by the breath of the sun.

A song of ice and fire, indeed.

Source: vimeo.com

Seeing (Infra)Red

I’m continually amazed at the added beauty of the world when we are allowed to view it from a point beyond our usual sensory range.

Do you know why plants are green? It’s because they reflect green light more intensely than other colors. If anything, that kind of makes them not green. If it doesn’t contribute to photosynthesis, they have no use for it. And although we can’t see it with our limited vision, they also eschew the infrared. 

Andrew Shurtleff has made a stunning time-lapse showcasing the world as viewed in near-infrared. The light-sensitive chips of digital cameras can sense these wavelengths outside human vision (near-infrared being about 800-2000 nm wavelengths compared to our 400-700 nm visual range). With the right kind of video editing, that infrared world comes alive like a planet painted from pure ice. The leafy material appears white due to its intense reflection of infrared light.

Holy wow.

Infrared photography has been used for decades to study vegetation. Kodak’s infrared-sensitive Aerochrome film paints the plant world in an eerie dusting of pink that you’ll have to see to believe. And NASA, whose scientists use the entirety of the electromagnetic spectrum to paint pictures of our world and others in Pepto-pink, create amazing works of Earth as art using infrared filters:

(via Bad Astronomy)

Source: Slate

Death Valley Dreamlapse

I am miserably sick today, thanks to the mountain cedar tree’s inability to fertilize without releasing something like 47 pounds of lung-choking immunostimulatory genetic material per tree. I mean look at these evil bastards:

image

Really? Is the mating efficiency of this species so low that we need to emit pollen by the dump-truck load? Evolution, we need to talk. We can do better than this.

Anyway, in my histamine-induced mucosal brain haze, this is just the kind of peaceful mind escape that I need. It’s this, or take a power drill to my sinus cavities.

Enjoy this time-lapse of the 2012 Geminid meteor shower peak as seen last December, captured from starkly beautiful Death Valley by Sunchaser Pictures.

Wave Your Stamens in the Air Like Ya Just Don’t Care!

I feel like time travel, while perhaps scientifically infeasible, can be achieved technologically by manipulating the scale of time rather than our position along its arrow. This allows us to leave the present behind, and experience a sort of alternate reality.

Those alternate realties are places where flowers are not mere bee-buffets, decorative flourishes and aromatic embellishments. They are dynamic symbols of awakening, floral fireworks, like nature’s way of saying “Good morning! What do you have for me today!?”

I give you Flowers by Katka Pruskova, 730 hours of blooming buds condensed to mere minutes.

Wash it down with an animated version of Richard Feynman’s epic “Ode To A Flower”.

Source: vimeo.com

Landscapes 2 by Dustin Farrell

Appreciate the full beauty of our planet, the marvelous details found in every leaf, stream and rock formation, captured through a mechanical eye invented by a creative species of apes in order to expand our vision of the universe around us in space and time, allowing light and dark to morph in ways our own brains could never discern, to track stars that our own eyes can not detect, and condense these ever-changing moments into a few precious minutes.

Or, you know, a time-lapse of landscapes.

Full screen, headphones, HD, smile.