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This is a famous location for finding fossils on the Dorset coast. Some really big and important finds were made in the late 1800s. The sea is constantly washing more of the cliff down onto the beach providing new opportunities for that once-in-a-lifetime find.
I had hoped to get the focus good enough for geologists to look at individual rocks in the cliff, but as you can see, I didn't quite nail it. The next bay to the East (right) at Seatown is here: http://tinyurl.com/m3f8ap. |
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A GigaPan of the bookshelf in my office intended to highlight a bunch of my "deskcrops" (geologic specimens I have a fond attachment to) for The Accretionary Wedge #4 (http://www.goodschist.com/2007/12/02/the-accretionary-wedge-4-call-for-submissions/). Unfortunately I didn't have any good way to light the office for photography and thus the images are pretty grainy when you zoom in much. I also didn't use the full zoom capability of the camera in order to keep the stitch a reasonable size. |
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As the Laurentide glacier retreated from the Champlain Valley 13,600 years ago, the ice damned the valley and Glacial Lake Vermont rose to about 170 m (550 feet) above sea level, which is the elevation of the camera. This sand and gravel was carried by an ice-marginal river that built kame terraces until it reached the lake where it dumped fine sediments into the standing water forming a delta more than 4 km long.
This quarry is the source of material that is spread on snow-covered roads in Salisbury. It is being sorted and stockpiled this month. Notes: I used a Nikon D40 with Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI-s lens, f/8, 1/160 second, ISO 200, NEF. 35mm equiv is 450mm. Field of view set to 3 degrees. |
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Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems
see http://www.carnegiemnh.org/exhibitions/hillman.htm for info on this hall of the museum |
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Distant cliffs of Fort Hays Limestone. Use red/blue glasses to view the anaglyph 3D effect. Created from two 12x3 Gigapan images shot about 1 foot apart. Alignment, cropping, and anaglyph shading done in Photoshop. |
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The view from the WWII gun emplacement/observation bunker/thingy overlooking the harbour. For a closer view of the harbour including the Gay Archer, see http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=22503. |
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A ~100 Ma intrusive igneous rock that is characteristic of Cretaceous granitoids of the Sierra Nevada Batholith.
How many minerals can you identify? |
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This is a thin section of dunite, a rock made up almost entirely of the mineral olivine, as seen in cross-polarized light through a Leica Z6 APO Macroscope. There is a band of black mineral grains to the left of center of the image that is a cumulate layer of the mineral chromite - in the magma chamber from which these minerals crystallized that band of chromite would have originally settled out in a horizontal layer. The width of the entire field of view visible here is just under 2 cm.
Unlike most of my GigaPans I didn't have help from the robot on this one. The thin section was moved by hand and the images were shot one by one. In fact, the stitch took far less time than the capture. Nonetheless it was well worth the effort - and the kind of task that is ideally suited to undergraduate/graduate students! :-) |
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Third of a series of three views of the spectacular folds in the Calico Hills just east of Barstow, California. |
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This tiny island is of course the site of the headquarters of the well-known International Rescue, but a little-known geographical feature of the Dorset Coast in the UK. The beach is one of the most fossiliferous coastal sites in England. If you have sharp eyes you may* just be able to make out cmlbath fossil-hunting at the base of the cliff in the distance.
You can see the bay to the West (left) here: http://tinyurl.com/lnx6gh and you can see where the gigapan was taken here: http://tinyurl.com/nd6kkp. For more gigapans of this area try searching on 'Charmouth' and/or 'fossils'. Here is a good one by Richard Edmonds to get you started: http://tinyurl.com/naaxog. Rock-heads may* be interested in the close-up of the cliff here: http://tinyurl.com/n4ftx4. Ack! I just noticed a horrible stitching error on the horizon ... Oh well, perhaps I will re-do it. I shot it bracketed and the sky has lots of texture so I could have some fun doing a little tone-mapping at the same time. FWIW This image is stitched with what is - in my opinion - the most over-priced and unreliable stitching software available - Autopano Giga 3.0.2. True it has made a better job of stitching on this occasion than the gigapan stitcher (http://tinyurl.com/ntlgce) but at least gigapan don't have the audacity to charge you the laughable price of €199 plus 20% tax for the privilege. And in any case gigapan stitching errors are highly entertaining. And the devs are nice people and say 'thanks' when you go to the trouble of posting them a DVD containing images that don't stitch. Recently APG failed to render a 9 by 5! And we are talking *multiband* here!! (Fume.) I need to go and have a little lie-down now. I'm not sure what the emoticon is for "brain explodes" but consider it to be this: {}==:-0 * "May" implies "may not". |