Small Planets

So to start the deploy of the insane number of pictures I have to put up I will begin with something called small planets. They're very cool IMHO (in my humble opinion) and I've been trying to get as many shots as I can to create them. To make them you need to start with a 360 degree panorama, or sometimes good wide angle shots will work, from there you do some fiddlin in photoshop and voila you have your small planet. Here are the few I've created so far.


This is McMurdo, the large protruding building there is the church. This was taken the first day I arrived on "Antarctic" soil. Technically McMurdo is on an island and not on the continent, but whatevs.



This is the South Pole outside of my Jamesway J-12 during the summer a few days after I arrived.



This is a shot from SPT, it's not a complete 360 hence the odd line. But the colors and makeup of the original Pano were awesome so I went with it.



This was a few nights ago 7-28, the pano this came from is pretty amazing if I do say so myself, and this small planet isn't so bad either ;}



This was around 2am the next day 7-29, the sky wasn't as cool then. There wasn't much of an aurora and with the moon getting brighter each passing day it blows out the stars, but still pretty cool I spose.

Here are two very small versions of the night panos the small planets above were created from. They will either eventually be uploaded to my flickr account while I am here, or after. We will see, the originals are huge. I tried making a 16bit tiff, but figured it was probably not worth it when the file size was going to end up being 4GB...

Anywho, here they are:


This one is from 7-28 around 2:30pm


And this one is from 7-29 around 2:30am. One of the nice things about the moon coming out fuller and fuller is that the sky turns to a very beautiful dark blue in the shots. I'm really going to miss the darkness, the sun should start coming up in 3ish or so weeks :{

Stupid sun who needs ya? Well maybe me if the sunrise is even has as beautiful as the sunset was. I've seen some auroras with a sunrise so that would be pretty sweet, we will see though.

More photos to come...