Tsundoku, a Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up rather than reading them.

Guilty!

Two spectacularly colourful images: one looking up into the sky, the other one looking down from space:

• Partial Solar Eclipse with Airplane
• Laguna Verde

• A captive crocodile
• A serene seal
• A mouse about to meet its maker

APOD: 2013 April 17 – Mt Hood and a Lenticular Cloud.

Twenty Awesome Covers From The US Space Program. My favourite is the cover for the manual for the NASA/Grumman Apollo Lunar Module: nothing else looks like the LM.¹

[Via Extenuating Circumstances]

1. Who, reading the documentation these covers contained back in the 1960s and even the early 1970s, would have believed that forty years on manned space travel still wouldn't have ventured further out into the solar system than the Apollo missions did? Don't get me wrong, I know the human race has plenty of robots exploring various interesting corners of the solar system and peering out into the wider universe. That's all well and good and I love reading about the things they're finding, but let's cut to the chase: we're running way behind schedule if I'm to live out my retirement years in a modest little cottage with a view out over the Mare Crisium! ↩

Life imitates Dragonball Z. On Twitter.

And why not?

[Via More Words, Deeper Hole]

Posting at The Planetary Society, Bill Dunford found A Different Angle on Mars by looking back at images from the Mars Global Surveyor:

Like all Mars Global Surveyor shots, these are views of the Red Planet from orbit. What's different here is the highly oblique angle of these images. In each, the powerful Mars Observer Camera is not oriented straight down for maximum resolution, but off toward the horizon.

The result is a set of views that make me think of what it might be like to be at Mars, flying over the planet in person, looking out the window. Be sure to enlarge them, and see if you enjoy them as much as I did.

I reckon the image of Olympus Mons is my favourite, just because it emphasises the sheer scale of the thing.

I know the various space agencies have to choose the sites where they land their probes so as to maximise both the chances of a successful landing and the amount of useful science they can do in their limited lifespan, but it'd be nice if at some point in the future someone could contrive to bring down a lander somewhere near the peak of Olympus Mons. The view from up there across the planet's surface would be a sight to see.

APOD: 2013 March 11 – Sakurajima Volcano with Lightning.

WTF, Evolution? (a.k.a. nightmare fuel.)

The hairy frogfish cannot believe what you've done…

… or …

I really don't want anyone to eat this wattle cup…

[Via Schneier on Security]

John Naughton's Shards B&W:

Best viewed as big as possible.

• Barely There
• Black Trevally
• Jenny
• fly high
• Mount Fuji, December 2007
• A Shed, Iceland
• Sydney Glows at Sunset
• Moon and mountains

[Barely There via FFFFOUND!, Jenny via Flickr Blog]

Star Trek, Pixar style:

Nice work.

[Via fuck yeah, science fiction!]

Artist Jim Kazanjian produced a series of photographs of imaginary houses, carefully assembled by matching up snippets of images of real houses to make something much weirder.

There are definitely untold stories behind those houses. Perhaps best left untold in some cases.

[Via Colossal, via MetaFilter]

This picture of ship tracks off North America isn't at all what I thought from the title when it popped up in my feed reader. They're not 'tracks' as in a bow wave¹, but the trails of clouds that form because of the trail of aerosols – be it exhaust fumes or just desert dust – that a ship leaves behind it.

There's also a rather nice animation showing almost 12 hours-worth of the tracks' movement.

1. Which was what I'd assumed the picture would show. ↩

APOD: 2012 November 21 – Diamond Ring and Shadow Bands.

Central Kamchatka Volcanoes, Russian Federation.

Florian Breuer's Quiver Trees By Night 2 makes for one spectacular image of the night sky over Namibia.

For what it's worth, I prefer the pre-photoshop version of the shot that he revealed in this post discussing how he produced the final image. The tweaked version is more striking, but it's not as if the unedited image is less than breathtaking.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Hurricane Sandy: After Landfall.

I found #48 particularly striking – surreal, even.

[Via The Browser]

• Multicoloured honey
• Lightning , Oklahoma
• A climber in Yangshuo
• Gannet, North Atlantic

If you can get to the end of this image gallery without wincing at least once then you're a better man than I. Or, possibly, you're a replicant.

[Via MetaFilter]