But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter that normally ships inside the camera (which also block out the deep reds) with a special filter to permit near infrared photography. Thus the reds you see here that most cameras won’t capture.  You can buy fully modified Canon 5D cameras, ready for astrophotography, from here.

Here are the technical specifics by William Castleman:

The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

*Michael Pollan on “Deep Agriculture” – video now available

The 4th Annual Maker Faire takes place this year on Saturday May 30th and Sunday the 31st at the San Mateo Fairgrounds and Long Now is thrilled to be an exhibitor for the third year running.

Maker Faire is an incredible experience for the whole family with exhibits ranging from gigantic Tesla coils to small steam driven robots to extreme crafting. Workshops, panels, live music, outdoor games, a craft market and the science pavilions are just some of the things you’ll encounter over this weekend.

Long Now is going to be bringing the full-sized Geneva wheel to Maker Faire! This is the first time we’ll be showing this piece to the public. We’ll also have other small prototypes and the Rosetta Disk on display.

We’ll be at booth #104 in the Expo Hall, so stop by and say hello if you’ll be attending.

A word to the wise – there were so many attendees at last year’s Maker Faire (over 60,000) that the highway exit for San Mateo became clogged and some people were stuck for hours in the traffic before getting in to the fairgrounds. Public transportation, on the other hand, flowed fluidly and using it this year is highly recommended.

You’ll want tickets and directions.  See you there!

Member Austin Quig-Hartman sent in a reference to this very cool clock project by Che-Wei Wang.  It reminds me of a clock version of Art Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete.“  What I find really interesting is that the designer ended up with  3.16 billion cycles which is basically the average number of beats a human heart will beat in a lifetime.  I am not convinced the little belt drives will make it very long into the future, but a beautiful execution and thought process all around.

From the designers write up:

Can we watch decay? Can we see glass as a fluid slowly slumping and deforming over time? Everything is in constant flux, yet we consider many things around us static and fixed. 3.16 Billion Cycles is an attempt to unravel a seemingly unchanging 100 years into a set of relationships in digestible increments.

A 60 rpm (revolutions per minute) motor drives the entire mechanism. It rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60 rpm motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion.

Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100 year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor.

Bragging about failure rarely gets a professor tenure, or makes a scientist famous.  However it is failure by which we all learn the most from.  The video above where Brian Cox discusses the first failure at the LHC is an excellent example of how interesting failure can be.The benefits of publishing negative or ‘inconsequential’ data has a dotted but successful past.  It was the partially successful results of early HIV drugs that, in combination, gave us the successful HIV cocktail treatments.  It was the baseline data of background CO2 levels from a Hawaiian volcano that gave us the first warnings of how CO2 is linked to Global Warming with the Keeling Curve.  It is the spectacular and catastrophic failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge that made engineering around constructive resonance the default. I hope somday to create a Museum of Failure, but until then, we have YouTube…

See Digi-Man and Blizzard duke it out over digital plans of a nuclear powerhouse!! It is good to see an effort to make digital preservation heroic, which as we saw with the Apollo tapes below, it certainly can be.

From the halls of Digital Preservation Europe

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

*Michael Pollan on “Deep Agriculture” – audio now available

Making farmers cool again

Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle…

Read the rest of Kevin Kelly’s Summary

Can a logographic script of a major world language survive its own government bureaucracy?  As reported in the NY Times:

“Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips.  The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.”

 There will be at least two folks we know of live-twittering from the Michael Pollan seminar for those of you who would like to follow it:

• @cyrusbryan  is a long time friend of Long Now who now runs the Chicago Long Now Meetup.com group.
• @current_green is Leah Lamb from Current TV who will also be covering the event.

We encourage anyone who would like to live twitter about the event to use the #longnow tag on their posts so that anyone can track the aggregate postings.  Also if you would like to Twitter the event yourself please post your handle in the comments of this blog post (with a one liner about yourself) and we will keep this list updated.

For those of you who dont know what Twitter is, here is a great video.

Please note that all the pre-sale tickets are sold out for the Pollan talk, but we will have a walk up line that will be first come first serve to try and fill as many un-claimed seats as possible.