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Been meaning to post this for a couple of days but not had a chance. These are stunning new images from Cassini of Enceladus’s icy jets and then Saturn in background. I’ve been waiting years for these – when incorporated in Outside In – will be even more amazing. Thanks to Emily Lakdawalla’s Planetary Society Blog for the post.  Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / animation by Emily Lakdawalla  NASA / JPL / SSI / processed by Emily Lakdawalla This is a very thought-provoking essay from SEED magazine worth a read. And it’s one of the first things I’ve come across that addresses the core themes in Outside In. It’s my view that answers, discoveries – actually even the right questions, are not to be found in the consumptive and internal/virtual angst-ing that is becoming the dominant activity on our planet. And this essay makes the point that video games and virtual worlds have become a poor substitute drug for the restless exploratory nature of our species – which is a big point in Outside In. But we are not going to find any new answers to anything in Halo 4 or Gawker 3.0. I think if you read this essay, the title of the film might be a little clearer. In other words, there is only one way for us to even ask the right questions – and that way is Outside In, not from the inside out.
Last minute notice but I just found out about this talk a few days ago and just heard a few minutes ago that my yet unreleased clip will be show at the end of the talk. So here’s your chance to see it. GTCC is bringing in University of Virginia Astronomer, Dr. Anne Verbiscer who is key member of the Cassini Imaging Team to talk about Saturn’s incredible moon Enceladus which plays a key part in Outside In (and is featured in my clip. Tonight 7 May, 7:30 p.m., Auditorium, Sears Applied Technologies Center, GTCC, Jamestown. Details are here: http://www.gtcc.edu/services/observatory/speakerSeriesNCAM/Verbiscer.html
It’s online and ready for viewing, but as reward for those who have been supporters of the film – they get to see it first. You can be a Team 11 member starting at just $1 a month, tax-deductible. Much more coolness like this coming as production on the film moves forward. And here’s more tease shots from the clip…
and
Two actual frames from the render currently in progress of the ultra cool clip promised in my last post – you can see the real photograph we are flying into here. These are from raw frames, so the gamma is a bit crushed going from 32-bit float color to 8-bit JPEG for web.
As we fly closer
More teasing to come as render continues. I render out image sequences, so I can look at finished frames as the render goes – each of these frames is a 250 megabyte TIFF image with lossless compression! A giant planet deserves giant frames. Just kicked off the render – even at 1/4 (25% resolution which is still 1400 X 1050 pixels), a 60 second shot is reporting a 120 hour render. Hopefully it will speed up. Hopefully, it will work okay. Thanks to the new CS5 version of After Effects which finally allows me to use all my techniques at IMAX resolution, I’m now rendering out the first color photographic flythrough of this photograph (below). The shot will first swoop by Titan, then across the planet and underneath the rings to arrive at Enceladus. Of course, there is no way for anyone to see it at it’s full 5600 x 4200 pixel glory until it’s output to IMAX film. So HD will have to suffice, for now. More details later, but let’s just say this shot which contain thousands upon thousand of Photoshop layers animated in After Effects, represents many months of labor on my part, many months of labor by several amatuer astronomers from the Unmanned Spaceflight Forum, many months of work by the Cassini Imaging team, and of course years of work by NASA/JPL/ESA to get the spacecraft into orbit around Saturn. Not only is this a world first, but it probably near a worlds most for human time put into 60 seconds of motion pictures. While my overclocked quad-core churns on this shot, this beautiful photo will have to satiate you until it successfully renders.
A new dedicated Outside In YouTube channel is up. I’m uploading earlier videos in full quality now plus brand new clips of unseen footage, some of it groundbreaking, world’s firsts type stuff – coming soon. http://www.youtube.com/outsideinmovie Subscribe and stayed tuned!
In 1966, another crazy guy (and I mean that it in a good way, like “the crazy guy making an IMAX film in his basement”) started a public campaign to get NASA to release a rumored satellite photograph of the whole earth. This guy, Stewart Brand, actually made a quite a stir with his campaign. In 1968, an astronaut, fairly informally, took the first photograph of the “The Whole Earth” as NASA still did not realize that a picture of earth might actually be more important than pictures of the moon. Using this photograph as the cover, Brand published the first “Whole Earth Catalog“, a highly influential publication that Steve Jobs and others called “the first Google”, in the fall of 1968. In addition, this made this first Earth portrait famous and it quickly became iconic. Within 18 months of Stewart’s publication, we had the first Earth Day and it’s visual symbol was a photograph of Earth. This is part of the driving mission of Outside In – to bring not just this photograph, but every single major photograph of our universe to the giant screen. I think it’s important and history tends to agree.
 us Still working on tweaking the new site. More content (new teaser, new Team 11 stuff and more) still not online yet. And still got various layout issues with bring content from old site over but have (hopefully) improved menu/link/rollover colors with new logo, sidebar features, sidebar on pages vs. blog posts as well as added lightbox features for images (clicking on image opens it nice box. As in below. Enjoy some nice Cassini images.
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