Apparently, this is how the Finnish do ice fishing:

Which is up? Which is down? I don’t know anymore.

via reddit

by Stephen McFarland

This artistic montage of our solar system — 30,000 pixels wide, 18MB in size — might be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time:

It’s not scientifically correct, to be sure, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. To think this is but one solar system in a universe where there are more stars than grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth!

By Licoti. Interactive zoom version here.

Planning on taking the Moscow metro at the beginning of the next century? If so, be sure to have this map handy — it should clear things up for you:

This map — and the version detailing the current Moscow Metro, which is slightly more sane — was made by Artemy Lebedev. In all seriousness, his map of the 2010 metro is a nice improvement to the current standard.

So that’s how it happened…

by Enrico Cireco

Zoomed to 6.066e+228 (2^760), this Mandelbrot fractal, which took 6 months to render, will make your room spin around if you stare at it long enough. To put things in perspective: An electron needs to be zoomed to 1E42 to equal the size of the known universe. This is zoomed to 1E228:

If the music isn’t your taste, disable it by dragging left on the rightmost bars in the player.

Two days to set up, and then six months to render, resulted in around forty 1.9GB uncompressed .AVI files. I added watermarking, fx and time remapping, before multi-pass encoding the 80GB video in h264 (32,768 kbit/sec) and the audio in AAC.

Want some perspective?

• 1E6 Vancouver Island
• 1E9 Jupiter’s radius
• 1E12 Earth’s orbit
• 1E18 distance to Alpha Centauri
• 1E21 Milky Way galaxy
• 1E30 large doesn’t cover it!
• 1E42 size of electron to the universe
• 1E228 incomprehensibly big…but we did it!

For the record, 1 to 6e228 is like expanding a proton to 70000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000 times the size of the visible universe.
(Proton has 1 femtometer diameter, universe has 93 billion light year diameter)

If you were actually traveling into the fractal, you would be moving faster than the speed of light.

Credit: Teamfresh

Here’s a taste of an amazing fantasy scene made by Finn Meinert Matthiesen using CryEngine 2, the graphics engine behind Crysis (click the images for larger versions):

I want to clarify (to avoid misunderstandings) that this project is just a personal realtime fantasy environment art project for my application for employment. It’s NOT a mod project and i’m NOT planning to release a playable version of this virtual environment. There are rumors that this is a fantasy mod for crysis. This is NOT true. I repeat – it is just a personal art project, although the scene is a playable realtime environment.

Thank you very much,
Finn Meinert Matthiesen

Credit: Finn Meinert Matthiesen aka. MadMaximus83 (deviantART profile)

Here is some jaw-dropping time-lapse footage of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano over the first two days of May:

Thanks to Lumenilux for the hint. Photography/video by Sean Stiegemeier, music by Jónsi.

See also Pictures of Eyjafjallajökull for some images of the lightning-filled initial eruption.

Made by Alex Roman — original available in MP4 format here (torrent).

by Robert Harvey Oshatz, photographed by Cameron Neilson.