Photos of Interest

his is a photo of a mask from an ancient Peruvian tomb.  The mask is about 1,500 years of., made of copper and seashells, among other items. style="display: inline;"> href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/photogalleries/king-bling-moche-tomb-pictures/index.html"> It is one of the front-page (web page, that is) photos at National Geographic.  The caption follows: April 10, 2009--Found in a treasure-filled tomb of the Moche culture in Peru, this 1,500-year-old gilded-copper-and-seashell funerary mask was one of two that shielded the face of the so-called Lord of Ucupe…
This photo is from Wikimedia; it shows a Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata) in the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Nagano Prefecture,Japan.  The photo is in the public domain. The Park features natural hot springs. There are more photos here and here.  There is a live webcam here.
This is precious. It is a screen shot from The Economist, from an article (The frat boy ships out) on the departure of George W. Bush. I recall that The Economist ended up endorsing Kerry, saying something like it was a tough call between two deeply flawed candidates.  Now, not so tough. It turned out to be the third-most "commented" article, gathering 338 comments, and being recommended by 282 readers.
Xinhua has helpfully posted the top 10 astronomy photos of the year (2008), according to National Geographic.
This photo is one of Yahoo's most emailed. (AP Photo/Detroit Zoo,Mark M. Gaskill)
This is a photo of the controls in the cabin of the Mallard, a steam locomotive built in 1938.  The Mallard was capable of traveling 202.7kph (126 mph), a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A14609333">record-high speed at the time.. The picture is from a series by href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6928">David Mindell, posted at IEEE Spectrum Online.  Below is a photo of the Mallard, photographer unknown, from the Artehouse at trains.com. One of the stations served by the Mallard was Paddington Station (London), which opened in 1854 ( href="http://www.designmuseum.org/…
It is not obvious what href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/haly/223020107/in/pool-stickfiguresinperil/">this sign is intended to depict, or why.  It almost has to be a photoshop job (?).
This is a sample from Euphoria Magazine's href="http://www.euphoria-magazine.com/nature/37-nature/287-nature-best-photography-of-2007">nature photography roundup for 2007.  I chose the most whimsical one; the others are more serious, but equally good.
The Cassini orbiter shows us what is happening in the final frontier: This is an aurora on Saturn.  It's false-color, obviously. The technique is explained on the href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11396.html">NASA site: This image of the northern polar region of Saturn shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different wavelengths of infrared light as captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the wavelength…
This is a nice photo, with a Creative Commons license.  It's a female Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna. href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/grandpamikey/2365843288/sizes/l/"> alt="clickto see Flickr page" title="clickto see Flickr page" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3231/2365843288_77385c6211.jpg" border="0" height="357" width="500"> href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/" title="Click this link to find out details of the Creative Commons license associated with this image."> src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif" alt="There is…
Here is a photo from the space station, showing some really big thunderheads: It is an inset from a high-resolution photo of Ike, courtesy of NASA: href="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/272686main_ISS017E015708_hi.jpg"> The photo posted on the NASA site is 2098x3072 pixels.  Click (twice) on the image to get the full effect.  More href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/hurr_ike091008.html">here.
August 6 is the anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.   href="http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2008/08/debt-rattle-august-6-2008-pointed-at.html"> This is a work of the US Government, and is not subject to copyright.
This is a photo from a collection of images that were modified using href="http://www.gimp.org/">GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program.  There is a small collection of such photos at href="http://www.junauza.com/2008/07/25-best-gimped-images.html">Tech Source From Bohol.  This href="http://209.234.77.62/gallery/kerry_rifle_large.html">particular image is at a href="http://209.234.77.62/stovepipe.html">less refined site, that Tech Source linked to. I made up the name. The original caption on the photo is "Innocence."
We decided to let one artichoke blossom, just to see what it looks like.  It turns out that it looks sort of like a thistle.  That's because it is a kind of thistle.  I hadn't known that.  The thistle is the national flower of Scotland.
This is a photo of two White Storks, Ciconia ciconia, nesting atop a primary school chimney near the south coast of Portugal. The photo is by Valter Jacinto, and has a Creative Commons license. Link. The White Stork is the national bird of Poland. In the USA, we would never allow storks to nest at a primary school. It would offend the fundamentalists.
I am not sure that it would make sense to grow artichokes, if the garden were serving to supply food in a crisis.  But we are not having a crisis yet, so we can have fun.  Artichokes are good, but the amount of food you get, per unit of garden, is not great. The artichoke was sort of an impulse buy.  I thought it was an attractive plant.  Perhaps there will be a trend to make gardens both attractive and edible. This photo was first converted to "black and white" (actually grayscale) because it seemed that it might look good that way.  Then I gave it a sepia tone, but did not really like…
A new world record has been set: The previous record for hanging spoons on a human face was 15.  Joe Allison "smashed" the record with 16.  He's only 16 years old.  He thinks that when his forehead is a little bigger, he'll be able to do 17. ( href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/05/content_7923147.htm">link)
This is a nice bit of Scandinavian design. But take another look.  Notice the ST segment? HT: href="http://www.neatorama.com/2008/03/15/heartbeat-bookshelf/">Neatorama.
I noticed this photo on Flickr... style="width: 375px; height: 500px;" class="inset" alt="click for original" title="click for original" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2281/2289722392_4203b644c1.jpg?v=0" border="0" height="500" width="375"> A smile is always worth something.
There are no cash rewards, and no instant fame.  But I have looked at a great many "best photo" series, and this is the most enjoyable.  Why?  Because every single one of the photos is in the public domain. It's the href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bild_des_Jahres/2007">Wikipedia Commons Picture of the Year series.  The page is in German.  My German is über-rusty, but it scarcely matters. This one is a photo from href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Canyon" rel="tag">Antelope Canyon.