Tag Archives: Open Culture

ICYMI – “NASA Unveils New Searchable Video, Audio And Imagery Library For The Public”

Greetings, fellow astrophiles!

In the event that the original announcement made it past you, I wanted to clear the following NASA News of out CNYO’s Inbox and spread the linkage around. The original announcement was released on 28 March 2017 (RELEASE 17-035), followed soon after after by a posting to the great Open Culture website (www.openculture.com – there’s an equally great discussion about the library on the Open Culture website HERE).

Consider your desktop background needs fulfilled.

As eye candy for the post, I found the single image of NGC 4565 – my personal favorite and one of the great “work for” eye candy galaxies in medium-sized telescopes.

NASA officially has launched a new resource to help the public search and download out-of-this-world images, videos and audio files by keyword and metadata searches from NASA.gov. The NASA Image and Video Library website consolidates imagery spread across more than 60 collections into one searchable location.

images.nasa.gov

NASA Image and Video Library allows users to search, discover and download a treasure trove of more than 140,000 NASA images, videos and audio files from across the agency’s many missions in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science, human spaceflight, and more. Users now can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions to download. The website also displays the metadata associated with images.

Users can browse the agency’s most recently uploaded files, as well as discover historic and the most popularly searched images, audio files and videos. Other features include:

* Automatically scales the interface for mobile phones and tablets
* Displays the EXIF/camera data that includes exposure, lens used, and other information, when available from the original image
* Allows for easy public access to high resolution files
* All video includes a downloadable caption file

NASA Image and Video Library’s Application Programmers Interface (API) allows automation of imagery uploads for NASA, and gives members of the public the ability to embed content in their own sites and applications. This public site runs on NASA’s cloud native “infrastructure-as-a-code” technology enabling on-demand use in the cloud.

The library is not comprehensive, but rather provides the best of what NASA makes publicly available from a single point of presence on the web. Additionally, it is a living website, where new and archival images, video and audio files continually will be added.

For more information about NASA’s activities, visit: www.nasa.gov

Open Culture – Astronaut Takes Amazing Self Portrait in Space

The following was posted on 22 December 2012 at the great website Open Culture – “The best free cultural & educational media on the web.” The image, described below, is available for direct download from the Astronomy Picture Of The Day archive HERE. For an enlightening afternoon of reading, consider checking out the many articles at Open Culture in the Astronomy category.

By Dan Colman

Taken at the International Space Station by astronaut Aki Hoshide (Japan), this awe-inspiring self portrait brings into one frame “the Sun, the Earth, two portions of a robotic arm, an astronaut’s spacesuit, the deep darkness of space, and the unusual camera taking the picture.” You’ll want to click the image above (or this link) to view the picture dubbed “Orbiting Astronaut Self-Portrait” in a worthy larger format.

Find other self-portraits taken in space here and here. And visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for more striking images each and every day.

via @coudal

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