[Editor’s note: Google has started to add museum collections to Google Earth. The Prada in Madrid includes a self portrait by Albrecht Dürer, Las Meninas, the dark Goyas, and the Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo. Video includes section on how Google took the photos. Thanks KL!]
Republished from the Duke Original January 14th, 2009 by Randy Riddle.
Google has added the El Prado museum to Google Earth, allowing you to not only see the buildings, but to do a “virtual tour†of 14 paintings in the collections, viewing them in incredible detail – each painting is captured and presented in 14 billion pixels.
Below is a short video and you can also read a blog post at Gizmodo about the project.
[Editor’s note: Colorado’s oldest newspaper published its final edition today, Friday February 27, 2009. The Rocky Mountain News, less than two months away from its 150th anniversary, was closed after a search for a buyer proved unsuccessful. Video above document’s the emotional Final Edition of the Rocky Mountain News. Scary times for the 4th Estate and democracy, let alone the economy. Video is by Matthew Roberts via Vimeo. Tnx KL!]
Republished from The Rocky Mountain News on 27 February 2009.
It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today. Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We speak, we believe, for all of them, when we say that it has been an honor to serve you. To have reached this day, the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News, just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday is painful. We will scatter. And all that will be left are the stories we have told, captured on microfilm or in digital archives, devices unimaginable in those first days. But what was present in the paper then and has remained to this day is a belief in this community and the people who make it what it has become and what it will be. We part in sorrow because we know so much lies ahead that will be worth telling, and we will not be there to do so. We have celebrated life in Colorado, praising its ways, but we have warned, too, against steps we thought were mistaken. We have always been a part of this special place, striving to reflect it accurately and with compassion. We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history – the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed. We are confident that you will build on their dreams and find new ways to tell your story. Farewell – and thank you for so many memorable years together.
I went out to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum annex at Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia last weekend and was pleasantly surprised to see one of the SRTM payloads hanging off the ceiling. The Shuttle Radar Telemetry Mapping program helped produce a significantly more accurate and detailed world-wide digital elevation model (DEM, DTM) in the early part of this decade and was a great leap forward for shaded relief generation. If you make the trip, you’ll find the SRTM between 22 and 23 on the map below in the “space shuttle” hanger. The map does a good job of indicating what altitude different aircraft can be found in the hanger.
Here’s a photo:
Cannister/Mast, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Payload
(republished from the Smithsonian)
In 2000, the Shuttle Endeavor carried the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) payload into orbit. Shuttle astronauts used the payload, manufactured by the AEC-Able Engineering Co., to map in high detail and three dimensions more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface–the most complete and accurate rendering of the planet’s land masses ever attempted. The Museum possesses two components–the mast canister (this artifact) and the outboard support structure with its antennas–crucial to that mission.
To acquire this data, the SRTM used a novel hardware system that featured a main antenna located in the Shuttle payload bay, a folding mast (in the mast canister) that extended 60 meters from the Shuttle, and then another antenna system that was positioned at the end of the mast (the outboard structure). It was this dual antenna system–the largest rigid structure then flown in space–that produced, through interferometry (a technique for combining the information obtained from the two, separate antennas), a three-dimensional mapping of the Earth.
The mission was a joint undertaking of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Department of Defense’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The military will use the highest resolution data from SRTM for terrain navigation for planes and cruise missiles. A lower resolution data set will be made available to civilian scientists and other users.
NASA transferred these artifacts to the Museum in 2003.
