Download 1,000+ Beautiful Woodblock Prints by Hiroshige, the Last Great Master of the Japanese Woodblock Print Tradition
For 200 years, beginning in the 1630s, Japan closed itself off from the world. In its capital of Edo the country boasted the largest city in existence, and among its population of more than a million not a single one was foreign-born. “Practically the only Europeans to have visited it were a handful of Dutchmen,” writes professor of Japanese history Jordan Sand in a new London Review of Books piece, “and so it would remain until the mid-19th century. No foreigners were permitted to live or trade on Japanese soil except the Dutch and Chinese, who were confined to enclaves in the port of Nagasaki, 750 miles from Edo. No Japanese were permitted to leave: those who disobeyed did so on pain of death.”
These centuries of isolation in the Japanese capital — known today as Tokyo — thus produced next to nothing in the way of Westerner-composed accounts. But “the people of Edo themselves left a rich archive,” Sand notes, given the presence among them of no few individuals highly skilled in the literary and visual arts.
Such notable Edo chroniclers include Andō Hiroshige, the samurai-descended son of a fireman who grew up to become Utagawa Hiroshige, or simply Hiroshige, one of the last masters of the ukiyo‑e woodblock-printing tradition.
Hiroshige’s late “pictures of the floating world” are among the most vivid images of life in Japan just before it reopened, works that Sand quotes art historian Timon Screech as claiming “attest to a new sense of Edo’s place in the world.” For the historiographical view of the sakoku (or “closed country”) policy has long since come in for revision. The Japan of the mid-17th to late 19th century may not actually have been as closed as all that, or at least not as free of foreign influence as previously assumed. The evidence for this proposition includes Hiroshige’s ukiyo‑e prints, especially his late series of masterworks One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
Now, thanks to the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s digital collection, you can take as long and as close a look as you’d like at — and even download — more than 1,000 of his works. That’s an impressive number for a single institution, but bear in mind that Hiroshige produced about 8,000 pieces in his lifetime, capturing not just the attractions of Edo but views from all over his homeland as he knew it, which had already begun to vanish in the last years of his life. More than a century and a half on, the coronavirus pandemic has prompted Japan to put in place entry restrictions that, for many if not most foreigners around the world, have effectively re-closed the country. Japan itself has changed a great deal since the mid-19th century, but to much of the world it has once again become a land of wonders accessible only through its art. Explore 1,000+ woodblock prints by Hiroshige here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Sonic Explorations of Japanese Jazz: Stream 8 Mixes of Japan’s Jazz Tradition Free Online
“Man,” a fellow working the checkout counter at Los Angeles’ Amoeba Music once said to me, “you sure do like Japanese jazz.” His tone was one of faint disbelief, but then, this particular record-shopping trip happened well over a decade ago. Since then the global listenership of Japanese jazz has increased enormously, thanks to the expansion of audiovisual streaming platforms and the enterprising collectors and curators who’ve used them to share the glory of the most American of all art forms as mastered and re-interpreted by dedicated musicians in the Land of the Rising Sun.
High-profile Japanese-jazz enthusiasts of the 2020s include the Turkish DJ Zag Erlat, creator of the Youtube channel My Analog Journal, whose short 70s mix of the stuff we featured last year here on Open Culture. But it was only a matter of time before the musical minds at London-based online radio station NTS broadcast the definitive Japanese Jazz session to the world.
Previously, NTS have dedicated large blocks of airtime to projects like the history of spiritual jazz and a tribute to the favorite music of novelist Haruki Murakami — a Japanese man and a jazz-lover, but one whose America-inspired cultural energy hasn’t been particularly directed toward jazz of the Japanese variety.
“Japanese jazz” refers not to a single genre, but to a variety of different kinds of jazz given Japanese expression. Hence NTS’ Japanese Jazz Week, each of whose bilingually announced broadcasts specializes in a different facet of the music. The first mix is dedicated to the late guitarist Ryo Kawasaki; the second, to traditional Japanese instruments like the shakuhachi, and the koto; the third, to Three Blind Mice, often described as “the Japanese Blue Note”; the fourth, to jazz fusion, one of the musical currents in Japan that gave rise to city pop in the 1980s; the fifth, to pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who played with the likes of Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis; the sixth, to modal jazz and bop from the 1960s to the 1980s; and the seventh, to free-improvising saxophonist Kaoru Abe, “a true maverick of late 70’s Japanese jazz.”
Japanese Jazz Week also includes a special on spiritual and free jazz as played in Japan “from its earliest stirrings in the 1960s until it reached international recognition in the 1970s.” The 70s, as the international fan consensus appears to reflect, was the golden age of Japanese jazz; as I recall, the heap of LPs I set down before that Amoeba clerk came mostly from that decade. The decade’s players, producers, labels, and concert venues continue their work today, the current pandemic-related difficulties of live performance aside. When the shows start and travel resumes again in earnest, no small number of Japanese-jazz fans will be booking their tickets to Tokyo at once, all in search of an offline Japanese Jazz Week — or two or three — of their own.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blistering “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo (2004)
Recently, I was walking with a young relative who, upon passing a mural of the late Prince Rogers Nelson, looked up at me and asked, “who is that?,” whereupon my eyes grew wide as saucers and I began the tale of a musical hero who conquered every instrument, every musical style, every chord and scale, etc. It was a story fit for young ears, mind you, but mythic enough, I guess, that it inspired my relative to stop me mid-sentence and ask in awe, “was he a god?” To which I stammered, caught off guard, “well, kind of…..”
Humanly flawed though he was, Prince comes as close as any recent figure to musical divinity in the flesh. He seemed to conjure and create effortlessly, ex nihilo, never seeming to tire and always looking as though he just stepped off of a cloud. Now we know a little more about the source of some of that serenity, but it diminishes his legend not one bit. If not a god, he was at least some sort of wizard.
Prince’s famously epic live solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in the star-packed jamboree cover of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” holds up as a wondrously succinct case in point to show the children. Now, the performance has been re-edited in a “director’s cut” by the broadcast’s original director Joel Gallen. Thom Dunn at Boing Boing quotes his explanation: “there were several shots that were bothering me. I got rid of the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince during his solo.” (See the original below.)
“Fortunately,” notes Dunn, “Gallen preserved the disappearing guitar at the end.” No one knows to this day where the guitar went, not even Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone, who was on stage behind Prince at the time. The stunt was unrehearsed, and so was everything about the solo — no one had any idea what was going to happen, a frightening prospect on live television but a risk one must take, I suppose, when working with the Purple One.
In 2016, Gallen told The New York Times the story, worth quoting in full, of the performance’s rehearsal, a moment of private humility from Prince behind his live bravura show onstage.
The Petty rehearsal was later that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his guitar. He says hello to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the middle solo, where Prince is supposed to do it, Jeff Lynne’s guitar player just starts playing the solo. Note for note, like Clapton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too! Prince doesn’t say anything, just starts strumming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, nothing memorable.
They finish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of huddle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This cannot be happening. I don’t even know if we’re going to get another rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy cannot be playing the solos throughout the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t worry about it.” And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.
No, kid, he wasn’t a god, just a guy who could do things no one else could. He was a genius.
via Boing Boing / Laughing Squid
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Kermit the Frog Gives a TED Talk About Creativity & the Power of “Ridiculous Optimism”
In 2015, 3.8 billion years after “creativity emerged” out of “sheerest emptiness,” Kermit the Frog was tapped to give a talk on creativity at TEDxJackson.
How did a local, one-day event manage to snag such a global icon?
Roots.
The famed frog’s creator, Jim Henson, spent his first decade in Mississippi (though Kermit was born of a ping pong ball and Henson’s mother’s old coat after the family relocated to Maryland.)
The conference took place 15 years after Henson’s untimely death, leaving Kermit to be animated by Steven Whitmire, the first of two puppeteers to tackle a role widely understood to be Henson’s alter ego.
The voice isn’t quite the same, but the mannerisms are, including the throat clearing and crumpled facial expressions.
Also present are a number of TED Talk tropes, the smart phone prompts, the dark stage, projections designed to emphasize profound points.
A number of jokes fail to elicit the expected laughs … we’ll leave it up to you to determine whether the fault lays with the live audience or the material. (It’s not easy being green and working blue comes with challenges, too.)
Were he to give his TED Talk now, in 2021, Kermit probably wouldn’t describe the audience’s collective decision to “accept a premise, suspend our disbelief and just enjoy the ride” as a “conspiracy of craziness.”
He might bypass a binary quote like “If necessity is the mother of invention, then creativity is the father.”
He’d also be advised to steer clear of a photo of Miss Piggy dressed as a geisha, and secure her consent to share some of the racier anecdotes… even though she is a known attention hog.
He would “transcend and include” in the words of philosopher Ken Wilber, one of many inspirations he cites over the course of his 23-minute consideration of creativity and its origins, attempting to answer the question, “Why are we here?”
Also referenced: Michelangelo, Albert Einstein, Salvador Dali, Charles Baudelaire, Zen master Shunryū Suzuki, mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, author and educator, Sir Ken Robinson (who appears, briefly) and of course, Henson, who applauded the “ridiculous optimism” of flinging oneself into creative explorations, unsure of what one might find.
He can’t wander freely about the stage, but he does share some stirring thoughts on collaboration, mentors, and the importance of maintaining “beginner’s mind,” free of pre-conceptions.
How to cultivate beginner’s mind?
Try fast forwarding to the 11:11 mark. Watch for 20 seconds. It’s the purest invitation to believe since Peter Pan begged us to clap Tinker Bell back to life.
Do you? Because Kermit believes in you.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...What Makes Ringo Starr a Great Drummer: Demonstrations from a German Teenager & Ringo Himself
The question of whether or not Ringo Starr is a great rock drummer — maybe one of the greatest– seems more or less settled among drummers. “From the simplistic heavy-hitting of Dave Grohl, to the progressive mind bending of Mike Portnoy, and way beyond,” writes Stuart Williams at Music Radar, “all roads lead back to Ringo.” Not only is Ringo “your favorite drummer’s favorite drummer,” but when he took the stage in 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, “you’d be hard-pushed to find another moment where one drummer inspired an entire generation of kids and teenagers to pick up a pair of sticks and beg their parents to buy them a kit.”
There was little precedent for what he did in rock drumming even in the band’s earliest years. Ringo helped change “the role of the drums from an orthodox, military and jazz-led discipline into a more democratised art form. If there was a blueprint for what drummers ‘did’ in rock ’n’ roll, Ringo’s approach widened it,” adds Music Radar. Much of his expansive vocabulary was accidental, at least at first, a product of what Beatles biographer Bob Spitz calls a childhood beset by “a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune.”
Like many a groundbreaking musician, Ringo played at what might be considered a physical disadvantage. He learned the drums in “the hospital band,” he once said, while convalescing from tuberculosis. “My grandparents gave me a mandolin and a banjo, but I didn’t want them. My grandfather gave me a harmonica… we had a piano — nothing. Only the drums.” Like Hendrix, he was a lefty forced to adapt to a right-handed version of the instrument, thus enlarging what right- (and left) handed drummers thought could be done with it.
As German drummer Sina demonstrates at the top of the post, Ringo’s unique style involves a great deal of subtlety, “tone, taste, musicality, and that left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit reverse-fell tom-tom work,” writes Boing Boing. We’ve previously featured Sina in a post in which great drummers pay tribute to Ringo. The daughter of a musician in German Beatles tribute band the Silver Beatles, she shows off an unimpeachable grasp of Starr’s signature moves.
In the clip above, Ringo himself demonstrates his technique on “Ticket to Ride,” “Come Together,” and his highest-charting solo single “Back Off Boogaloo.” In explaining how he employed his most highly praised talent — playing exactly what the song needed and no more — he shows how the drum pattern in the Abbey Road opener came directly from John’s vocals and Paul’s bass line. In “Ticket to Ride,” he shows how he works from his shoulder, producing a downbeat that’s slightly ahead.
Where do Ringo’s quirks come from, according to Ringo? “It has to do with swing,” he deadpans, “or as we keep mentioning, medication.” More seriously, he explains above in an interview with Conan O’Brien, he “leads with his left,” a limitation that he turned into a musical legacy on his favorite Beatles drum moments and on everyone else’s.
via Boing Boing
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite
The Japanese art of tsugite, or wood joinery, goes back more than a millennium. As still practiced today, it involves no nails, screws, or adhesives at all, yet it can be used to put up whole buildings — as well as to disassemble them with relative ease. The key is its canon of elaborately carved joints engineered to slide together without accidentally coming apart, the designs of which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture in animated GIF form. Though it would be natural to assume that 21st-century technology has no purchase on this domain of dedicated traditional craftsmen, it does greatly assist the efforts of the rest of us to understand just how tsugite works.
Now, thanks to researchers at the University of Tokyo, a new piece of software makes it possible for us to do our own Japanese joinery as well. Called, simply, Tsugite, it’s described in the video introduction above as “an interactive computational system to design wooden joinery that can be fabricated using a three-axis CNC milling machine.” (CNC stands for “computer numerical control,” the term for a standard automated-machining process.)
In real time, Tsugite’s interface gives graphical feedback on the joint being designed, evaluating its overall “slidabilty” and highlighting problem areas, such as elements “perpendicular to the grain orientation” and thus more likely to break under pressure.
This is the sort of thing that a Japanese carpenter, having undergone years if not decades of training and apprenticeship, will know by instinct. And though the work of a three-axis CNC machine can’t yet match the aesthetic elegance of joinery hand-carved by a such a master, Tsugite could well, in the hands of users from different cultures as well as domains of art and craft, lead to the creation of new and unconventional kinds of joints as yet unimagined. You can download the software on Github, and you’ll also find supplementary documentation here. Even if you don’t have a milling system handy, working through virtual trial and error constitutes an education in traditional Japanese wood joinery by itself. The current version of Tsugite only accommodates single joints, but its potential for future expansion is clear: with practice, who among us wouldn’t want to try our hand at, say, building a shrine?
via Spoon & Tamago
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A 4,000-Year-Old Student ‘Writing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Corrections in Red)
Americans raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books tend to associate slates with one room schoolhouses and rote exercises involving reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.
Had we been reared along the banks of the Nile, would our minds go to ancient gessoed boards like the 4000-year-old Middle Kingdom example above?
Like our familiar tablet-sized blackboards, this paper — or should we say papyrus? — saver was designed to be used again and again, with whitewash serving as a form of eraser.
As Egyptologist William C. Hayes, former Curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum wrote in The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, From the Earliest Times to the End of the Middle Kingdom, the writing board at the top of the page:
…bears parts of two model letters of the very formal and ultra-poite variety addressed to a superior official. The writers consistently refer to themselves as “this servant” and to their addressees as “the Master (may he live, prosper, and be well.)” The longer letter was composed and written by a young man named Iny-su, son of Sekhsekh, who calls himself a “Servant of the Estate” and who, probably in jest, has used the name of his own brother, Peh-ny-su, as that of the distinguished addressee. Following a long-winded preamble, in which the gods of Thebes and adjacent towns are invoked in behalf of the recipient, we get down to the text of the letter and find that it concerns the delivery of various parts of a ship, probably a sacred barque. In spite of its formality and fine phraseology, the letter is riddled with misspellings and other mistakes which have been corrected in red ink, probably by the master scribe in charge of the class.
Iny-su would also have been expected to memorize the text he had copied out, a practice that carried forward to our one-room-schoolhouses, where children droned their way through texts from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.
Another ancient Egyptian writing board in the Met’s collection finds an apprentice scribe fumbling with imperfectly formed, unevenly spaced hieroglyphs.
Fetch the whitewash and say it with me, class — practice makes perfect.
The first tablet inspired some lively discussion and more than a few punchlines on Reddit, where commenter The-Lord-Moccasin mused:
I remember reading somewhere that Egyptian students were taught to write by transcribing stories of the awful lives of the average peasants, to motivate and make them appreciate their education. Like “the farmer toils all day in the burning field, and prays he doesn’t feed the lions; the fisherman sits in fear on his boat as the crocodile lurks below.”
Always thought it sounded effective as hell.
We can’t verify it, but we second that emotion.
Note: The red markings on the image up top indicate where spelling mistakes were corrected by a teacher.
via @ddoniolvalcroze
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images
An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of development and months of feedback,” write the creators of the Letterform Archive online design museum, “we’re opening up the Online Archive to everyone. This project is a labor of love from everyone on our staff, and many generous volunteers, and we hope it provides a source of beautiful distraction and inspiration to all who love letters.”
That’s letters as in fonts, not epistles, and there are thousands of them in the archive. But there are also thousands of photographs, lithographs, silkscreens, etc. representing the height of modern simplicity. This and other unifying threads run through the collection of the Letterform Archive, which offers “unprecedented access… with nearly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images.”
You’ll find in the Archive the sleek elegance of 1960s Olivetti catalogs, the iconic militancy of Emory Douglas’ designs for The Black Panther newspaper, and the eerily stark militancy of the “SILENCE=DEATH” t‑shirt from the 1980s AIDS crisis.
The site was built around the ideal of “radical accessibility,” with the aim of capturing “a sense of what it’s like to visit the Archive” (which lives permanently in San Francisco). But the focus is not on the casual onlooker — Letterform Archive online caters specifically to graphic designers, which makes its interface even simpler, more elegant, and easier to use for everyone, coincidentally (or not).
The graphic design focus also means there are functions specific to the discipline that designers won’t find in other online image libraries: “we encourage you to use the search filters: click on each category to explore disciplines like lettering, and formats like type specimens, or combine filters like decades and countries to narrow your view to a specific time and place.”
From the radical typography of Dada to the radical 60s zine scene to the sleek designs (and Neins) found in a 1987 Apple Logo Standards pamphlet, the museum has something for everyone interested in recent graphic design history and typology. But it’s not all sleek simplicity. There are also rare artifacts of elaborately intricate design, like the Persian Yusef and Zulaikha manuscript, below, dating from between 1880 and 1910. You’ll find dozens more such treasures in the Letterform Archive here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Women Street Photographers: The Web Site, Instragram Account & Book That Amplify the Work of Women Artists Worldwide
It’s almost impossible not to wonder how reclusive artists of the past — like anonymous street photographer and Chicago nanny Vivian Maier — would fare in the age of Tumblr and Instagram. Would Maier have become internet famous? Would she have posted any of her photographs? The little we know about her makes it hard to answer the question. Maier lived a life of abstemious self-negation. “She never exhibited her work,” Alex Kotlowitz writes at Mother Jones, “she didn’t share her photos with anyone, except some of the children in her care.”
And yet, Maier was known to enjoy conversations about film and theater with knowledgeable people. One suspects that if she had been able to stay in touch with like minds, she might have been encouraged by a supportive community she couldn’t find anywhere else. We might imagine her, for example, submitting a select few photographs to Women Street Photographers, a project that began in 2017 as an Instagram account and has since “burgeoned into a website, artist residency, series of exhibitions, film series, and now a book published this month by Prestel,” Grace Ebert writes at Colossal.
For women street photographers living and working today, the project offers what founder Gulnara Samoilova says she needed and couldn’t find: “I soon began to realize that with this platform, I could create everything I had always wanted to receive as a photographer: the kinds of support and opportunities that would have helped me grow during those formative and pivotal points on my journey.” The project is international in scope, bringing together the work of 100 women from 31 countries, “a tiny sampling of what’s out there.”
In her introduction to the 224-page book, Samoilova describes the importance of such a collection:
Street photography is both a record of the world and a statement of the artist themselves: it is how they see the world, who they are, what captures their attention, and fascinates them. There’s a wonderful mixture of art and artifact, poetry and testimony that makes street photography so appealing. It’s both documentary and fine art at the same time, yet highly accessible to people outside the photography world.
There are Vivian Maiers around the world driven to document their surroundings, whether anyone ever sees their work or not. Maier made her photographs “for all the right reasons,” says Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick. “She made them because to not make them was impossible. She had no choice.” But perhaps she might have chosen to show her work if she had access to platforms like Women Street Photographers. We can be grateful for such outlets now: they offer perspectives that we can find nowhere else. Women Street Photographers will announce the winners of its inaugural virtual exhibition “on or around April 1.”
via Colossal
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Finnish Astrophotographer Spent 12 Years Creating a 1.7 Gigapixel Panoramic Photo of the Entire Milky Way
In the final, climactic scene of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, the Milky Way engulfs the protagonist — an aesthete who keeps himself detached from the world, a universal perspective overtaking an insignificant individual.
We now know the Milky Way itself to be a minuscule part of the whole, just one of 100 to 200 billion galaxies. But until Edwin Hubble’s observations in 1924, it was thought to contain all the stars in existence.
The Milky Way-as-universe is a powerful image, and certainly more comprehensible than the universe as astronomers currently understand it. Its vastness can’t be compressed into a symbolic form like the via lactea, “Milky Way,” or as the Greeks called it, galaktikos kýklos, “milky circle.” Andy Briggs summarizes just a few of the ancient myths and legends:
To the ancient Armenians, it was straw strewn across the sky by the god Vahagn. In eastern Asia, it was the Silvery River of Heaven. The Finns and Estonians saw it as the Pathway of the Birds.… Both the Greeks and the Romans saw the starry band as a river of milk. The Greek myth said it was milk from the breast of the goddess Hera, divine wife of Zeus. The Romans saw the river of light as milk from their goddess Ops.
A barred spiral galaxy spinning around a “galactic bulge” with an empty center, a “monstrous black hole,” notes Space.com, “billions of times as massive as the sun”… the Milky Way remains an awesome symbol for a universe too vast for us to hold in our minds.
Witness, for example, the just-released image further up, a 1.7 gigapixel panoramic photo of the Milky Way, from Taurus to Cygnus, 100,000 pixels wide, pieced together from 234 panels by Finnish astrophotographer J‑P Metsavainio, who began the project all the way back in 2009. “I can hear music in this composition,” he writes at his site, “from high sparks and bubbles at left to deep and massive sounds at right.”
Over 12 years, and around 1250 hours of exposure, Michael Zhang writes at Petapixel, Metsavainio “focused on different areas and objects in the Milky Way, shooting stitched mosaics of them as individual artworks.” As he began to knit the galactic clouds of stars and gasses together into a Photoshop panorama, he discovered a “complex image set which is partly overlapping with lots of unimaged areas between and around frames.” Over the years, he filled in the gaps, shooting the “missing data.” He describes his equipment and process in detail, for those fluent in the technical jargon. The rest of us can stare in silent wonder at more of Metsavainio’s work on his website (where you can also purchase prints) and Facebook, and let ourselves be overtaken by awe.
via Petapixel and Kottke
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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