View allAll Photos Tagged deeptime
Father and son looking at Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History - David H. Koch Hall of Fossils. (2/8/2020)
Stepping out into the crisp afternoon air, Arthur pulled his coat tight against the breeze. The journey up from London Euston had been smooth enough, but after hours cooped up on the train and navigating the short walk from Lime Street, he was glad to stretch his legs down Ranelagh Street.
The familiar, reassuring hum of Liverpool enveloped him. The warm, golden hour light bathed the street, casting a soft glow over the brick and stone facades—the familiar sights of Millets and Ladbrokes, the gentle crawl of traffic, and the grand, stately silhouette of the Britannia Adelphi Hotel anchored at the end of the road.
Then, Arthur stopped dead in his tracks.
Directly behind the Adelphi, the air shivered like heat haze on hot tarmac, and the modern world began to peel back like an old memory. Looming over the city, where the road gently slopes upward, stood a colossal, frozen titan—a towering wall of glacial ice, its deep, jagged crevasses glowing with an eerie, cyan light. A ghost of the last Ice Age had suddenly materialized, exposing the barren, gravelly expanse that ruled this exact spot 15,000 years ago.
Feeling a sudden, surreal chill, Arthur glanced down at the bus shelter poster just inches from his left elbow. There, in bold white letters across a frost-dusted advertisement, the text blared: DEEP FREEZE — IT RUNS DEEP.
He looked from the tagline back to the ancient wall of ice swallowing the horizon, letting out a breath that misted in the air. The city was peddling a cold drink to commuters, completely oblivious to the fact that deep time had just frozen Ranelagh Street right in its tracks.
Taking a look back into deep time with this belemnite fossil from the Jurassic period I found some months ago.
For #FlickrFriday #LookBack theme and "Looking close... on Friday!" theme "A Single Stone"
"It was four o'clock according to my guess,
Since eleven feet, a little more or less,
my shadow at the time did fall,
Considering that I myself am six feet tall."
~from Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Impressive Mammoth skeleton. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History - David H. Koch Hall of Fossils. (2/8/2020)
2021
More artwork at: www.permiandesigns.com/
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NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
detail from "'A Pictorial Chart of Daniel's Visions' arranged and published by J. V. Himes, 14 Devonshire St. Boston" Joshua Vaughan Himes (1805-1895) 1886
Larkin and Russo have fun with seeing what the continents used to look like in this interactive display. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History - David H. Koch Hall of Fossils. (2/8/2020)
Miller Museum of Geology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
pseudopod-in-pseudopod, two-of-a-kind were trundling along together more than half a billion years ago collected from a small quarry north of Kingston Ontario.
trace fossil track display of soft body, sluglike critters called Climatichnites hailing from ~515 million years ago in the Cambrian; they were among the first known animals to come ashore on a global scale
big animals, too! my spread hand would fit in each trackway with room to spare; fossils of the actual creatures have yet to be found
doubling down with more onshore from the same era_
link to a larger trackway at McGill University's Redpath Museum in Montréal, with _two_ kinds of critters from this slice of deep time from another quarry in the same locale.
near Duntulm Castle, Isle of Skye. These were only recently discovered (2015). I had downloaded a scientific article from a journal which gave details on how to find these tracks. When we were there we saw a man and his son and mentioned to them about the tracks and the man said "I know, I discovered them...". Turns out he was one of the authors of the article I had with me. (I think he was pleased I had used the article to find the footprints). He took the time to show me some other less obvious footprints and said that these tracks in the photo were made by a long-necked sauropod (as big as a double decker bus) about 65 million years ago when Skye was located in a tropical lagoon. It was a strange feeling to stand on this exact spot and think that all those years ago this huge animal stood here and walked off towards the horizon.
This narrow hoodoo spire rises from the badlands like a frozen flame, its form shaped by differential erosion acting on soft, fine-grained Cretaceous sediments. Wind abrasion, rare but intense rainfall, and repeated freeze–thaw cycles have slowly pared the surrounding material away, leaving behind a remnant where slightly harder layers resisted destruction just long enough to stand alone. It is a temporary monument, balanced between persistence and inevitable collapse.
Above it, the Milky Way’s dense star fields and dust lanes arc across the sky, visible here because of the extreme darkness of the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. The bright core marks the direction toward the center of our galaxy, roughly 26,000 light-years away, its light traveling for tens of millennia before reaching this isolated desert plain. The juxtaposition compresses two very different scales of time: rock formed from sediments laid down when dinosaurs roamed this region, and starlight that began its journey long before humans existed.
Standing in the silence, with only wind moving across the clay and sand, the hoodoo feels less like an object and more like a pointer, quietly connecting Earth’s slow, granular erosion with the vast, ongoing dynamics of the cosmos. It is a reminder that even the most fragile stone column is part of a universe measured in both grains of sediment and billions of years.
Photo © copyright by Matt Payne.
2023
More artwork at: www.permiandesigns.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/permiandesigns/
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/permiandesigns.bsky.social
NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
Today we have been setting some natural history context for the story of "The First Tasmanians". This is a permanent exhibition at the QVMAG in Launceston. An exhibition curated by the museum and art gallery in conjunction with the Aboriginal community.
www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/Exhibitions/Permanent/The-First-Tasm...
Over the next two days we'll look at some of the specific cultural aspects.
The little machine pictured above allows the viewer to watch a simulation of how the landscape of Tasmania has changed over the last 50,000 years - not long before the first people arrived. This is deep time, prehistory, before we even begin to have oral history.
[Enlarge the photograph and you should be able to read the display.]
Released: 04.01.22
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NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot, dying star smothered in a blanket of hailstones. A new Hubble image reveals fresh detail in the wings of this cosmic butterfly.
Most planetary nebulae are distinctive, but few are as extreme as NGC 6302, also known as the Bug Nebula. The fiery, dying star at its centre is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones. Robert Frost's 1920 poem "Fire and Ice" could have been written for this object:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
This image of the Bug Nebula, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows impressive walls of compressed gas, laced with trailing strands and bubbling outflows. A dark, dusty torus surrounds the inner nebula (seen at the upper right). At the heart of the turmoil is one of the hottest stars known. Despite a sizzling temperature of at least 250,000 degrees C, the star itself has never been seen, as it is hidden by the blanket of dust and shines most brightly in the ultraviolet, making it hard to observe.
Chemically, the composition of the Bug Nebula also makes it one of the more interesting objects known. Earlier observations with the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory, ISO, have shown that the dusty torus contains hydrocarbons, carbonates such as calcite, as well as water ice and iron. The presence of carbonates is interesting. In the solar system, their presence is taken as evidence for liquid water in the past, because carbonates form when carbon dioxide dissolves in liquid water and forms sediments. But its detection in nebulae such as the Bug Nebula, where no liquid water has existed, shows that other formation processes cannot be excluded.
Albert Zijlstra from UMIST in Manchester, UK, who leads a team of astronomers probing the secrets of this extreme object, says: "What caught our interest in NGC 6302 was the mixture of minerals and crystalline ice - hailstones frozen onto small dust grains. Very few objects have such a mixed composition."
The dense dark dust torus around the central star contains the bulk of the measured dust mass and is something of an enigma to astronomers. They believe the nebula was expelled around 10,000 years ago, but do not quite understand how it formed and how long the dust torus can survive evaporation by the now very hot central star.
2022
More artwork at: www.permiandesigns.com/
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NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
Powerful gushers of energy from seething stars can sculpt eerie-looking figures with long flowing veils of gas and dust. One striking example is "the Ghost of Cassiopeia," officially known as IC 63, located 550 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen.
The nebula’s ethereal glow might remind people of apparitions such as those reported by paranormal investigators. In reality, it's simply hydrogen that is being bombarded with ultraviolet radiation from the nearby, blue-giant star Gamma Cassiopeiae (not seen here), causing it to glow in red light. The blue color is from light reflected off of the nebula’s dust.
The IC 63 nebula is not the only object under the influence of the blinding star, which unleashes as much energy as 34,000 suns. The Ghost Nebula is part of a much larger nebulous region surrounding Gamma Cassiopeiae that measures approximately two degrees on the sky — roughly four times as wide as the full Moon.
The constellation Cassiopeia is visible every clear night from mid-northern and higher latitudes. Its distinctive "W" asterism, which forms the queen's throne, is best seen high in the sky on autumn and winter evenings. Gamma Cassiopeiae, the middle star in the W, is visible to the unaided eye, but a large telescope is needed to see IC 63.
Hubble photographed IC 63 in August 2016.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
You can read a lot in the landscape. That's not the first time I've said that in this forum. And you know, for all of our efforts, the terrain still guides our travels, and the underlying geology shapes the terrain.
At the left, with its tower is Black Mountain, whose eponymous Sandstone has its scraps in Parliament House's undercroft. Over its shoulder is Mount Ainslie; the eroded core on an ancient volcano. The hard bits stick out, and stay like that for a long time.
Under that big wet patch is the Molonglo River which once meandered across the legendary Limestone Plains; a sheep farm spoiled by whatever it is that's down there now. Its water are held back by a barrage, down there in the right. It's unnatural. Before that, it guided feet here, onto that plain for the annual meet, greet and moth feast.
Whatever that thing on the plain is, it was planned, sort of. At about 1 o'clock there was a plan to construct a factory. A geophysical survey — wisely done as it would transpire — discovered a honeycomb of caves in that limestone. Banished further into the sheep paddock, that, ahem, planned factory site, remains as a grassy slope.
If we turned around — we won't, it's unattractive — we'd see another unavoidable reality of the terrain. The valleys of the Cotter, Molonglo and Murrumbidgee Rivers unite, as they do, in the low places. They follow joins between rock types; and great faults that pass this way too. Behind them are towering ridges, and between here and there valleys rise up and narrow inexorably onto the aforementioned plain. One thing leads to another.
This place ignores "being in the moment". Residing instead in deep time, its shoulder shrug off today. Sediment cores from Lake George/Weereewa are spiced with charcoal and the palynological evidence that the past climax, but fire sensitive, cover of Casuarina trees was replaced by more resilient Eucalyptus as the land dried and readied to burn.
Just a blink of an eye ago, in 1939, a lightning strike lit up the mountains; quite literally. The track that took me to Mount Aggie was then known as the Border Break. Of course, it was folly. The fire stepped over it like it was a chalk line on the pavement. Those tapering valleys funneled that conflagration in this direction. Not crowded then by people, and those people not cowed by the task to quell a blaze, it was stopped before it set alight to the nascent city.
Roll forward to 1952. It happened again, only this time they mobilised the public servants from their offices and beat the thing to death… As we have become more aware and enlightened, in 2003 they let the red steer have its head, burnt the forest, burnt the 'burbs and burnt this hill. Something happened to slow the fire: the hard structures of fences, roads and houses.
We aren't looking to the west, where the weather is created by the spin of our little rock and the rise of the land, because the forest is being replaced by the very things that society doesn't want to burn, but ironically, the very things that slow the rapid progress of fire.
You already know what comes next! The terrain, for all that building, remains unchanged. Fire will come again, the wind will come from the west and those suburbs, not there before, will be on the fire front so much earlier. I'm almost laughing out loud! The very thing that destroyed the forest and led to a new arboretum here at our feet, will bump into a more resistant foe. These trees will be safer from the human folly that will put the people closer to the threat; opposite to the policy that let it born in 2003! One thing leads to another!!
This image of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1-2403 was part of the Hubble Space Telescope's Frontier Fields project, which combined the power of natural "gravitational lenses" in space with Hubble's ability to create long-exposure deep field images. Gravitational lenses occur when the immense gravity of massive galaxy clusters magnifies and distorts the light from objects behind them. This makes it possible to see objects far beyond the reach of normal telescopes. In this case, joint observations of this cluster by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed an extremely distant galaxy that would have existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers nicknamed the galaxy Tayna, which means "first-born" in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America. Tayna represents a smaller, fainter class of newly forming galaxies that had previously evaded detection, and which were thought to be more representative of the early universe, offering new insight on the formation and evolution of the first galaxies. MACS J0416.1-2403, is located in the constellation Eridanus.
This is a unique view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure. It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called "ellipticals." Such S0 galaxies, with disks like spirals and large bulges like ellipticals, are called 'lenticular' galaxies. NGC 5866 lies in the Northern constellation Draco, at a distance of 44 million light-years. It has a diameter of roughly 60,000 light-years only two-thirds the diameter of the Milky Way, although its mass is similar to our galaxy. This Hubble image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006.
NGC 5866 is an edge-on galaxy that is tilted to our line-of-sight. It is classified as an S0 lenticular, due to its flat stellar disk and large ellipsoidal bulge. NGC 5866 lies in the Northern constellation Draco, at a distance of 44 million light-years (13.5 Megaparsecs). It has a diameter of roughly 60,000 light-years (18,400 parsecs). This Hubble image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Hubble Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in November 2005.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have identified the new record-holder for the smallest object that forms like a star: a tiny, free-floating brown dwarf with only three to four times the mass of Jupiter. A paper describing the observations appears today (Dec. 13) in the Astronomical Journal.
Brown dwarfs are objects that straddle the dividing line between stars and planets. They form like stars, growing dense enough to collapse under their own gravity, but they never become dense and hot enough to begin fusing hydrogen and turn into a star. Planets, on the other hand, form in the disk of gas and dust that surrounds a star. At the low end of the scale, some brown dwarfs are comparable with giant planets, weighing just a few times the mass of Jupiter.
“One basic question you’ll find in every astronomy textbook is, ‘what are the smallest stars?’” said Kevin Luhman, professor of astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science, the lead author of the study. “That’s what we’re trying to answer.”
To locate this newfound brown dwarf, Luhman and his colleague, Catarina Alves de Oliveira of the European Space Agency, chose to study the star cluster IC 348, located about 1,000 light-years away in the Perseus star-forming region. This cluster is young, only about 5 million years old. As a result, any brown dwarfs would still be relatively bright in infrared light, glowing from the heat of their formation.
The team first imaged the center of the cluster using Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) to identify brown dwarf candidates from their brightness and colors. They followed up on the most promising targets using Webb’s near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) microshutter array.
The muted red tones of the globular cluster Liller 1 are partially obscured in this image by a dense scattering of piercingly blue stars. In fact, it is thanks to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that we are able to see Liller 1 so clearly in this image, because the WFC3 is sensitive to wavelengths of light that the human eye cannot detect. Liller 1 is only 30 000 light-years from Earth — relatively neighbourly in astronomical terms — but it lies within the Milky Way’s ‘bulge’, the dense and dusty region at our galaxy’s centre. Because of that, Liller 1 is heavily obscured from view by interstellar dust, which scatters visible light (particularly blue light) very effectively. Fortunately, some infrared and red visible light are able to pass through these dusty regions. WFC3 is sensitive to both visible and near-infrared (infrared that is close to the visible) wavelengths, allowing us to see through the obscuring clouds of dust, and providing this spectacular view of Liller 1.
Liller 1 is a particularly interesting globular cluster, because unlike most of its kind, it contains a mix of very young and very old stars. Globular clusters typically house only old stars, some nearly as old as the Universe itself. Liller1 instead contains at least two distinct stellar populations with remarkably different ages: the oldest one is 12 billion years old and the youngest component is just 1-2 billion years old. This led astronomers to conclude that this stellar system was able to form stars over an extraordinary long period of time.
This photograph of Ednburgh Castle was taken during the Deep Time light show to start to mark the begining of the 2016 Edinburgh Festival. It was handheld at a shutter speed of 2.5 seconds.
This photograph of Ednburgh Castle was taken during the Deep Time light show to start to mark the begining of the 2016 Edinburgh Festival. Hand held at 1.3 seconds.
Nel silenzio primordiale del deserto, i massi rossi della Goblin Valley State Park custodiscono il tempo come un segreto inciso nella pietra.
Levigati da eoni di vento, sabbia e gelo, emergono dalla terra arida come antichi custodi, modellati da un paziente dialogo tra roccia ed eternità.
Qui il tempo non scorre: sedimenta. Strato dopo strato, granello dopo granello, trasforma la fragilità in forma, l’erosione in scultura. Camminare tra queste presenze silenziose è attraversare un calendario geologico, che mi ha ricordato che siamo polvere e ombre, con una grandissima opportunità di cogliere il tempo presente
Buona giornata
#GoblinValley #UtahDesert #RedRocks #EternalTime #PaesaggioAmericano #DesertVibes #GeologicalWonders #RocceRosse #NaturePhotography #SlowTime #ErosioneNaturale #AmericanSouthwest #SilenzioDelDeserto #DeepTime #TravelUtah #EarthArt #LuceDelTramonto #WildLandscape #FormaEDurata #DesertDreams
This composite image shows the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745 (MACS J0717, for short), where four separate galaxy clusters were involved in a collision — the first time such a phenomenon has been documented. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory mapped hot gas, while NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an optical image of the galaxies. The coolest gas is reddish purple, while the hottest gas is blue, and temperatures in between are purple. The repeated collisions in MACS J0717 are the result of a 13-million-light-year-long stream of galaxies, gas, and dark matter — known as a filament — pouring matter into a region already full of matter. A collision between the gas in two or more clusters causes the hot gas to slow down. However, the massive and compact galaxies do not slow down as much as the gas does, and so move ahead of it. Therefore, astronomers can estimate the speed and direction of each cluster's motion — perpendicular to the line of sight — by studying the offset between the average position of the galaxies and the peak in the hot gas. MACS J0717 is located about 5.4 billion light-years from Earth. It is one of the most complex galaxy clusters ever seen. Other well-known clusters, like the Bullet Cluster and MACS J0025.4-1222, involve the collision of only two galaxy clusters and show much simpler geometry.
science.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-8b38d13a-912b-4ac4-b5ab...
An amazing opening event for this years Edinburgh Festival. Which combined Art, Science and Technology in this city of the Enlightenment.
See www.eif.co.uk/2016/deeptime#.V6fLRqKuHWk for more and video of the show.
Welcome World
Released: 04.01.22
/// New Album, "Item 10: The Necropolis of Animals" OUT NOW: avirtualmemory.bandcamp.com/album/item-10-the-necropolis-... ///
Bandcamp:
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More artwork at: www.permiandesigns.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/permiandesigns/
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/permiandesigns.bsky.social
NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
This photograph of Ednburgh Castle was taken during the Deep Time light show to start to mark the begining of the 2016 Edinburgh Festival. It was hand held at a shutter speed of 4sec, which even image stabilisation isn't going to keep steady! So I just let the movement of the lights speak for itself...
2023
More artwork at: www.permiandesigns.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/permiandesigns/
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/permiandesigns.bsky.social
NOTE: All works featured here are completely original creations. None are made with the assistance of any form of AI technology in any fashion whatsoever.
Featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is a nearly edge-on view of the lenticular galaxy NGC 4753. These galaxies have an elliptical shape and ill-defined spiral arms.
This image is the object's sharpest view to date, showcasing Hubble’s incredible resolving power and ability to reveal complex dust structures. NGC 4753 resides around 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo and was first discovered by the astronomer William Herschel in 1784. It is a member of the NGC 4753 Group of galaxies within the Virgo II Cloud, which comprises roughly 100 galaxies and galaxy clusters.
This galaxy is believed to be the result of a galactic merger with a nearby dwarf galaxy roughly 1.3 billion years ago. NGC 4753’s distinct dust lanes around its nucleus are believed to have been accreted from this merger event.
It is now believed that most of the mass in the galaxy lies in a slightly flattened spherical halo of dark matter. Dark matter is a form of matter that cannot currently be observed directly, but is thought to comprise about 85% of all matter in the Universe. It is referred to as ‘dark’ because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, and therefore does not seem to emit, reflect or refract light.
This object is also of scientific interest to test different theories of formation of lenticular galaxies, given its low-density environment and complex structure. Furthermore, this galaxy has been host to two known Type Ia supernovae. These types of supernovae are extremely important as they are all caused by exploding white dwarfs which have companion stars, and always peak at the same brightness — 5 billion times brighter than the Sun. Knowing the true brightness of these events, and comparing this with their apparent brightness, gives astronomers a unique chance to measure distances in the Universe.
[Image Description: Lenticular galaxy NGC 4753 is featured with a bright white core and surrounding defined dust lanes around its nucleus, that predominantly appear dark brown in colour. A variety of faint stars fill the background of the image.]