sky

Michael Zhang

Aerial Photographs Showing Patterns and Repetition

Alex MacLean is a Massachusetts-based photographer and pilot who uses his dual interests to create epic aerial photographs.

Alex MacLean has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes. His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments.

Michael Zhang

Incredible Wallpaper Created Using 88,000 Photographs of the Sky

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.

Michael Zhang

55-Hour Exposure of a Tiny Patch of Sky Reveals 200,000 Galaxies

This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% of the entire sky!

Michael Zhang

Photos of High Powered Laser Rainbows Projected Across the Night Sky

"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.

Michael Zhang

Little Planet with the Aurora Borealis

Swedish photographer Göran Strand created this amazing "little planet" photo (AKA a stereographic projection) that shows the Aurora Borealis overhead. He titled it "Planet Aurora".

Michael Zhang

Double: A Blue Sky and White Vapor Trail

Upon first glance, the photograph Double by photographer Katsuhiro Saiki might look like some sort of abstract modern painting of a blue canvas divided by a thin white line. Look a little closer, and you'll find that it's actually a photograph of the sky divided neatly in half by an airplane vapor trail.

Michael Zhang

Dreamlike Photo Manipulations of Earth and the Starry Night Sky

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

Michael Zhang

Stunning Star Trails Photographed from the Australian Outback

Photographer Lincoln Harrison captures jaw-dropping photographs of star trails. Shooting from the Australian outback, he spends up to 15 hours creating each image of the night sky. Shooting with a Nikon D7000, Nikon D3100, and a wide assortment of lenses, Harrison captures a large number of exposures of the foreground and stars separately. He then combines the images (sometimes hundreds of them) into amazing photographs showing the sky dominated by colorful star trails.

Michael Zhang

More People Have Walked on the Moon Than Have Captured the Analemma

Want a challenging photography project? Try capturing an analemma in a single shot. "Analemma" is the name given to the figure-eight shape traced by the sun if photographed at the same time of day over the course of a year. To capture it, you'll need to leave your camera in a fixed position and shoot photos at exactly the same time of day for all of the shots.

Michael Zhang

Canon 24-105mm Lens Falls From Sky and Tears Gaping Hole in Roof

On September 2nd, a woman in Northern California named Debbie Payne heard a loud crash and, upon investigating, found a smashed Canon 24-105mm lens on the ground and a gaping 9-inch hole in her roof. Now the police department in Petaluma is trying to figure out how the lens apparently fell from the sky.

Michael Zhang

Clouds Photographed Through an Open Plane Door 4 Miles Up

For his project "Cloud Collection", photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow went about four miles off the ground and photographed clouds through the open door of the plane. With no glass between Nehmzow and the sky to muddy up the shots, the resulting photographs are absolutely stunning.

Michael Zhang

Lunar Eclipse Over the Acropolis

Photographer Elias Politis created this beautiful image showing the June 15 lunar eclipse over the Acropolis in Athens, Greece by shooting a time-lapse video and then combining the stills into a single frame.

Michael Zhang

Hunting for Sun Dogs in the Sky

If you love both traveling and photography, a fun photo project might be to shoot through a checklist of atmospheric phenomena. You probably know about auroral lights, but have you heard of parhelia, aka sun dogs? These are bright spots of light in the sky, often seen on a bright halo around the sun when it's low in the sky.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Time Lapse of a Starry Night Sky

If you live in an urban area, you probably don't see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there's videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren't artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.

Michael Zhang

Time Lapse in Joshua Tree National Park During the Perseid Meteor Shower

Last week we featured a stunning time-lapse video that unfortunately failed to capture Perseid meteor shower well because of too much air traffic in the area. Landscape photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee attempted the same kind of video in Joshua Tree National Park. Even though there's still quite a bit of air traffic, you can clearly see quite a few shooting stars that light up the sky.