As Above, So Below

Navigation

Mouse:
< and > buttons

Mouseover posts to use scroll wheel

Keyboard:
LEFT/RIGHT or J/K

UP/DOWN and HOME/END
activate when you click on a post

Comet Lovejoy Over Esperance, Australia

Short but sweet time lapse of Comet Lovejoy as it fades from Earth’s field of view. Be sure to watch this in HD on fullscreen. The movement of the sky is the result of our planet’s rotation. The white streak in the center is Lovejoy’s tail which becomes progressively clearer as the night wanes.

MÖBIUS, An Optical Illusion Interactive Public Sculpture

Produced by large-scale art & design practice ENESS and commissioned by Federation Square, a mixed-use public space in Melbourne, Australia, the public interactive art sculpture, MÖBIUS was filmed and photographed in stop-motion. For these two weeks in May 2011, these undulating green geometric pieces were carefully positioned by filmmakers and public volunteers. The resulting video is amazing to watch, as is the corresponding MAKING OF MÖBIUS film.

(via Laughing Squid)

Southern Ocean Sky | Alex Cherney

Clouds and sky both show illuminating changes during this time lapse video from the south of Australia. In the foreground are scenes visible over a rocky coastline toward the Southern Ocean. Dark clouds flow across the sky, sometimes from different directions, sometimes blocking background starlight, but other times causing stars to appear to flare as they move in front.

In the first sequence, looking toward the southwest, a nearly vertical band of zodiacal light is seen at sunset just before the band of the Milky Way Galaxy appears to settle into the sea. Soon the unusual dark patch of the Coal Sack Nebula can be seen on the Milky Way band, near the famous Southern Cross. Later, looking toward the southeast at about 2:10 in the video, Orion can be seen rising appearing nearly perpendicular to how it risesin northern skies.

The composite video, winner of an award STARMUS astrophotography competition, took over a year to compile in 2009 and 2010 from over 30 hours of exposure.

(via APOD)

Australian 'angel' saves lives at suicide spot »

In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. “Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea?” the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.

For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia’s most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called The Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.

(via givemesomethingtoread)

The Dreaming

When the British first washed ashore on the shores of Australia they found a strange landscape, strange animals and a strange people who had a simple primitive technology. What most offended the British is that the Aboriginal people of Australia clearly had never attempted to improve upon their lot. That was offensive to the British because self-improvement was the ethos of the Victorian age. The British concluded off course that the Aboriginal people of Australia were savages. And they simply began to shoot them.

As recently as 1902 it was debated in the Parliament in Australia as to whether Aboriginal people were human beings. As recently as the 1960s a text book for kids, a treasury of fauna of Australia, included the Aborigines as among the interesting examples of Australian wild-life. But what was it that was really going on? What the British failed to understand was that the Aboriginal people had in fact developed one of the most extraordinary philosophical traditions in the history of humanity.

We know from the studies of Y chromosome that the Aboriginal people of Australia were the first wave of human beings to walk out of Africa. They reached Australia remarkably quickly and certainly had settled the continent by 50,000 years ago. They reached that most parsimonious of continents and then they went walking over time establishing as many as 10,000 clan territories all of which were linked together by a single idea. And that idea was the dreaming. And the dreaming wasn’t a dream it was a state of perpetual existence in multi-dimensional space. The purpose of life for the Australian was not to improve on anything but simply to do the ritual gestures that were necessary to maintain the world exactly as it was at the time of the first dawning when the rainbow serpent spread its body across the earth and the ancestors sang the world into being. In not one of the 670 dialects and languages of Australia is there a word for time, past, present, or future. The Aboriginal people of Australia were not victims of history, they were people who in a sense had defeated the notion of history itself. A people whose traditions answered both the question how and why.

— Wade Davis, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World