2025-11-18 02:04:21
Kevin Kelly shares some essential apps & services for independent travel in China. “A good rule of thumb is to download your apps outside of China before you leave, because most are behind their great firewall.”
2025-11-18 01:00:43
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned:
See also All the Dogs, Explained: “Standing on his hind legs, [the tallest ever Great Dane] was taller than Shaq.”
2025-11-18 00:21:56
They’re making a live-action Legend of Zelda movie?
2025-11-17 23:48:55
The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after workers placed the first part of a cross at the top of its central tower. The Barcelona church will top 564 feet when the rest of the cross is placed in the next few months.
2025-11-17 23:01:27
A digital atlas of the Roman Empire’s entire road network (180,000+ miles). “The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community.”
2025-11-17 22:15:53
Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of the jump and some behind the scenes calculations on Instagram.
We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot; while factoring in the aircraft’s power-off glideslope for the optimal sun angle and safe exit altitude. Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft (shout out to the pilot @jimhamberlin) and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way coms!
As if that wasn’t hard enough, we had a myriad of malfunctions that almost led to the shot not being captured… But as you can see, against all odds, we got it on the sixth try!
That sounds….complicated. But the results speak for themselves. More coverage of this on Petapixel and Colossal.
As Petapixel notes, the photos are composite shots:
After he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo.
(thx, alex)
Tags: Andrew McCarthy · astronomy · Gabriel Brown · photography · skydiving · sports · Sun