An international research team has observed signs of rotation in a galaxy that existed only 500 million years after the Big Bang, easily the earliest galaxy ever observed that shows a signature of rotation.
Instead of capturing a night sky time-lapse with the stars spinning overhead, Windston attached a GoPro HERO4 to his star-tracking telescope rig and shot the 1-minute video above that show's Earth's rotation in a different way.
It turns out the only thing standing between Olympus and even better image stabilization than the E-M1 Mark II's already insane 6.5 stops... is the rotation of the Earth.
Part awesome party-trick, part brilliant idea, the new Cycloramic app from Egos Ventures is about the coolest thing you can get for one dollar on the iTunes app store at the moment. The app -- which will only work with the iPhone 5 -- triggers your phone's vibration at the exact right frequency to make it spin around in a perfect circle. Just stand your phone up, hit go, and keep an eye on your friend's faces (several reviewers called the reactions "priceless").
Recognize the warning message above? It's what Windows XP would show whenever you tried to rotate a JPEG image 90° using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. If you're like me, you probably didn't think twice about it (and checked the checkbox), since you had done it many times already and hadn't noticed any difference in quality. After all, how hard can it be to turn a digital photo sideways? You just move the pixels around right?
Well, not really. The fact of the matter is, JPEG is a "lossy" compression algorithm that's geared towards storing and sharing photos without taking up too much disk space. Rotating these compressed images is usually done by decompressing, rotating, and then re-compressing. Since the re-compression is lossy (i.e. data is thrown away), this process results in slightly degraded photos (hence that warning).