Yesterday we shared some photos of the Sun Halo that kept New Yorkers pointing their cameras skyward most of the day. That phenomenon is both harmless and cool to look at. Unfortunately, the recent ice heaves — glacier-like lake ice that is pushed inland by strong winds — in Minnesota only fall into the second of those categories.. Read more…

Earlier today, we shared a time-lapse put together by an amateur storm chaser that captured 10 tornadoes touching down in Minnesota over the course of one chase. But time-lapses come in a few different varieties.

There are the ones that manage to turn an hour of footage into about 5-minutes of excitement — like the tornado time-lapse. And then there are majestic time-lapses that capture some of the most stunning vistas you may never have the chance to visit in person. Doug Urquhart and Paul Zizka’s short film “Mountains in Motion” falls squarely into that second category, and it’s got the film festival awards to prove it. Read more…

Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek captured this gorgeous black-and-white photograph of a man feeding ducks and swans in Kraków, Poland (here’s a high-res version of the photo).

It’s amazing how picture perfect the framing and the scene are. The photo is like a spontaneous yin-yang image, with the man dressed in black in front of white snow, and white swans swimming on dark water. Unsurprisingly, the image is going viral online.

(via Marcin Ryczek Fotografia via Reddit via Bored Panda)

P.S. Here’s an strangely similar photograph by Reddit user skrobul.

Thanks for sending in the tip, Deebo!

There’s a crazy storm hovering over New York City, and a few hours ago ex-NFL player Dhani Jones shot this epic Instagram photograph of it from 10,000 on a Delta airlines flight. It’s crazy how the downpour is so concentrated that it looks like a giant tornado tearing through the city.

(via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Photograph by Dhani Jones

Skycatcher Wallpaper is a monumental display created by artists Jonathan Puckey and Luna Maurer. It’s composed of a whopping 88,000 individual photographs of the sky above Amsterdam captured over two years with the camera snapping a photo every five minutes. Each vertical strip contains 144 photographs and shows exactly one day. The gradual change in the number of daylight hours results in fluctuations in the shape of the blue daylight sections of the wallpaper.
Read more…

Photographer Yasuaki Segawa captured this incredible photograph of the Milky Way rising above the ocean, as seen from Taketomi Island, Japan. In addition to the uber-sharp stars, reflections of two bright stars can be seen in the waters. Segawa used a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24mm f/1.4 lens, and composited 5 separate photos to make this image (allowing him to expose the sky and the foreground separately). He also compensated for star rotation to sharpen the sky and prevent star trails. A higher-res version can be found here.

This incredible time-lapse video was created using photos captured from the International Space Station at night.

[It] begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon.

We showed an ISS time-lapse before that showed the the Aurora Borealis from space, but seeing lightning from space is even cooler!

As Space Shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station to head back to Earth for the final time, one of the astronauts on the ISS captured this beautiful image of the shuttle’s glowing re-entry. Any guesses for what shutter speed this was shot at?

Station Crew Views Shuttle Landing (via Popular Science)

Update: Someone from the Photo Operations Group at the Johnson Space Center was kind enough to leave a comment with the answer: 1.6 seconds, f/2.8 at an ISO of 10000.

NASA captured this incredible photograph of the tornado that tracked across Massachusetts last week, showing the storm’s destructiveness as seen from space. The Westfield-Charlton tornado remained on the ground for an hour and ten minutes, carving a 39-mile-long path of destruction into the ground that was half a mile wide at some points.

Tornado Track near Sturbridge, Massachusetts (via Popular Photography)

In 2007, 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof purchased a box filled with 30,000 negatives from an estate sale for $400. After being stunned by the quality of the street photographs, Maloof began digging and discovered that they were created by a nanny and street photographer named Vivian Maier. He then decided to purchase the other boxes of negatives, bringing his collection of Maier photos up to about 100,000 images. Now some are saying he might have discovered one of the greatest (and previously unknown) street photographers of the 20th century. You can view some of Maier’s photographs here.

Next time you’re at an estate sale, you might want to take a closer look at any boxes of negatives you come across.

Thanks for the tip lebigz!