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'Visual Massage'

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To start off the summer, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps showcasing views of the Sun from our Solar Dynamics Observatory!

Since its launch in 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (or SDO) has kept up a near-constant watch on the Sun from its vantage point in orbit around Earth. SDO watches the Sun in more than 10 different types of light, including some that are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere so can only be seen from space. These different types of light allow scientists to study different parts of the Sun – from its surface to its atmosphere – and better understand the solar activity that can affect our technology on Earth and in space.

The new set of stamps features 10 images from SDO. Most of these images are in extreme ultraviolet light, which is invisible to human eyes.

Let’s explore the science behind some of the stamps!

Coronal hole (May 2016)

The dark area capping the northern polar region of the Sun is a coronal hole, a magnetically open area on the Sun from which high-speed solar wind escapes into space. Such high-speed solar wind streams can spark magnificent auroral displays on Earth when they collide with our planet’s magnetic field.

Solar flare (August 2011)

The bright flash on the Sun’s upper right is a powerful solar flare. Solar flares are bursts of light and energy that can disturb the part of Earth’s atmosphere where GPS and radio signals travel.

Active Sun (October 2014)

This view highlights the many active regions dotting the Sun’s surface. Active regions are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun – linked to sunspots – that are prone to erupting with solar flares or explosions of material called coronal mass ejections.

Plasma blast (August 2012)

These images show a burst of material from the Sun, called a coronal mass ejection. These eruptions of magnetized solar material can create space weather effects on Earth when they collide with our planet’s magnetosphere, or magnetic environment – including aurora, satellite disruptions, and, when extreme, even power outages.

Coronal loops (July 2012)

These images show evolving coronal loops across the limb and disk of the Sun. Just days after these images were taken, the Sun unleashed a powerful solar flare.

Coronal loops are often found over sunspots and active regions, which are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun.

Sunspots (October 2014)

This view in visible light – the type of light we can see – shows a cluster of sunspots near the center of the Sun. Sunspots appear dark because they are relatively cool compared to surrounding material, a consequence of the way their extremely dense magnetic field prevents heated material from rising to the solar surface.

For more Sun science, follow NASA Sun on Twitter, on Facebook, or on the web.

Winner of the Glas Animation Festival Gif Competition

Last Friday the GLAS Animation Festival announced the winner of their Gif Competition.  The winner of the $500 prize went to https://giphy.com/channel/David32bit whose only social media contact is listed as Facebook.  There is no other information on who he is, but you can see a number of his other works on Giphy.

Compared to its previous attempt at a Gif Film Festival which I wrote about here (so long ago!) I think that this time it was done well.  They gave extensive exposure to their 67 ‘Best Submissions’ on Giphy itself and they included a lot of pretty good work there.  Anna Malina, Julia Farkas and Falcao Lucas are artists I have written about before and had work there.  I had a number of pieces in the mix.

It helped that the Glas Festival was completely online, because they could avoid having to show the Gif in a theater setting, which presents problems.  The Glas people were smart to simply farm it out to Giphy and use their platform, but it did leave that little nagging thought that the really good art was within the carefully designed web site while those pesky gifs are over there on the Giphy page.  But maybe I am just being insecure.

The winning selection was a good piece of work.  It has a nice apocalyptic feeling, looks appropriate for the subject, and loops perfectly.  The fact that the winner is a relative unknown can only be seen as a positive.  I wonder if David32bit is even aware of NFTs, or maybe, like the story of I told here of Bad Codec, he is creating and selling NFTs under another name.

The complete absence of NFT mentions in any of the GLAS animation literature was a little bit weird, because that subject dominates digital art these days so thoroughly.  We are truly at an inflection point where it seems the question will not be about whether you understand anything about NFTs, but where your NFTs are, just like it became default to have an Instagram page.  I am sure that Linktree’s business is booming.

To try to braid these topics together, I think it is possible that in a future a Film Festival like this with Gifs ALL of the Gifs would be NFTs and when Giphy shows them, each time they are viewed the artist gets a small royalty payment.  As it is, the Giphy page had 586,000 views.  Those numbers add up

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