Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In captured some skydiving footage using a GoPro HD camera and then slowed it down with Twixtor for an ethereal faux slow-motion video of skydivers floating through the heavens.

Terje Sorgjerd is a master of out-of-this-world timelapse videos. After stunning all of us with one featuring the northern lights earlier this year, he’s back again with an even crazier one that captures the Milky Way over El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain. The individual frames were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 17mm TSE, Canon 16-35mm II, Canon 24/1.4II, and Sigma 12-24mm.

Thanks for the tip, Mladjo!

Here’s a Picasa gallery showing Google satellite imagery of various locations in Japan before and after the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami. It’s a pretty startling birds-eye-view of how devastating the tsunami actually was.

Japan (via Boing Boing)

This creative time-lapse video (a commercial for Volvo) shows a beautiful outdoor scene transform from one season to another through time-lapse photography. If computer trickery wasn’t involved in the creation, then this video must have required a whole lot of patience and hard work.

Thanks for the tip, Joakim!

This is a stunning time-lapse video of an entire night at the ALMA Array Operations Site in Chile (the largest astronomical project in existence). The antennas point at the same part of the sky at any given moment, so their movements are perfectly synchronized. If you think watching a sunset is beautiful, wait till you see our galaxy come into view in this video.

P.S. This video could do with music. We recommend playing some Sigur Ros in the background while watching this.

Landscape and architectural photographer David Kaplan captured this stunning photograph of the Moon and Venus rising above the village of Trübbach in Switzerland.

Sometimes a morning sky can be a combination of serene and surreal. Such a sky perhaps existed before sunrise this past Sunday as viewed from a snowy slope in eastern Switzerland. Quiet clouds blanket the above scene, lit from beneath by lights from the village of Trübbach. A snow covered mountain, Mittlerspitz, poses dramatically on the upper left, hovering over the small town of Balzers, Liechtenstein far below. Peaks from the Alps can be seen across the far right, just below the freshly rising Sun. Visible on the upper right are the crescent Moon and the bright planet Venus. Venus will remain in the morning sky all month, although it will likely not be found in such a photogenic setting. [#]

You can see this photo and others like it on Kaplan’s website and Flickr stream. NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website has a large version of it too.

Moon and Venus Over Switzerland (via Boing Boing)

Image credit: Photograph by Dave Kaplan and used with permission

Tor Even Mathisen created this stunning timelapse video of the aurora borealis over Tromsø, Norway, shooting the still frames with a Canon 5D Mark II and 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens. The individual frames captured are beautiful in themselves, but the result of combining them into a timelapse video is breathtaking.

(via planet5d)

Alex Roman, the genius behind the breathtaking “The Third & The Seventh“, recently created this short commercial spot for Grupo Cosentino. It’s certainly stunning, but here’s the kicker: it’s completely computer generated, created by two people over the course of two and a half months.

We’ve featured the amazing time-lapse work of Tom Lowe here before (see here and here), but here’s another sneak peek at his upcoming debut film titled “TimeScapes” that will drop your jaws. Stunningly beautiful.

(via Vincent Laforet)

“Nuit Blanche” is a 4-minute long short film by Arev Manoukian of SpyFilms that will blow your mind. While you’re watching it, try to guess how it was created — see if you can pick out what’s real and what’s “shopped“. It may remind you a bit of The Third & The Seventh, another mind-blogging short we shared at the beginning of the year.
Read more…