Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image centre, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught.

The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught continues to move out from the Sun and dim, but should remain visible in southern skies with binoculars through the end of this month. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

A while back I wrote about Photosynth, a new image technology created by Microsoft. Now Adobe has come up with something similar, yet quite different and unique. Infinite Images is created by the Israeli scientist Shai Avidan, hired by Adobe last year.

This new image technology enables you to create a three dimensional, virtual place from any set of photos where the photos themselves not necessarily are from the same place or using the same motif/composition.

The video below illustrates what I’m trying to tell:

This could be very cool if it actually works for anyone…

Faststone image viewer is a FREE image browser, converter and editor that supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA. It has a nice array of features such as image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, colour adjustments, musical slideshow and much more.

It’s also packed with keyboard shortcuts and cool and useful info when hovering your mouse over the images. Last, it’s really really FAST

Fore more information and to download visit faststone.org

Came across some amazing photographs today from the Antarctic’s posted on the Telegraph. Click the photo below to visit the source and see the rest in the series:

While working in 3d last year David O’Reilley discovered this optical illusion.

A large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.

Source: David O’Reilley