Nikon has bought a majority stake in the U.S. startup Morf3D, an aerospace supplier that has a list of high-profile customers internationally including Boeing. The Japanese camera company's investment comes ahead of an expected boom in small satellite production.
We've seen spectacular city tour hyperlapses, and creative hyperlapses created using Google Street View images, but until today, we had never seen a trans-Pacific hyperlapse that put us right in the driver's seat (pilot's seat?) of a Boeing 747.
NASA is known for using some impressive optics for its telescopes. But with amazing optics come some logistical limitations.
Ground-based lenses used by NASA can be as massive as needed, but are limited due to atmospheric distortion. Those used in space-based telescopes such as Hubble, on the other hand, must be much smaller, capable of being launched into space and fixed on-the-fly. This leaves NASA with a little Catch–22.
A Catch-22 they’ve managed to find an answer to in the form of SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy): a Boeing 747 with a 17-ton telescope packed inside.