

Photography - 24 hour shot - pan69
http://greeksky.gr/GreekSkyForum/index.php?topic=2.0

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pan69
Hires image:
[http://www.greeksky.gr/files/photos/landscapes/20101230Souni...](http://www.greeksky.gr/files/photos/landscapes/20101230Sounio24Big.jpg)

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chanri
It looks really cool!, but I don't understand how it is a 24 hour shot. It
just looks like a tiny planet with a house on top. Could somebody please
explain the image?

(The description by the author in the post is complicated)

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raquo
Think of it as a wide 360 degree panorama picture stitched from images taken
at different times of the day. This would yield a wide, non-distorted
rectangular image.

This one combined image was then rolled around itself in such a way that its
whole bottom edge is now in the center of this "planetary" image, and its top
edge is now the outer circumference of the image (the border with black).

If you're wondering why the center point of the image is not heavily distorted
it's because it was overlaid with a simple top-down photo of the place the
tripod was standing on.

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jonah
This reminds me of some of my friend Ethan's (completely analog) work:
<http://ethanturpin.squarespace.com/photography/> (The round ones at the
bottom.)

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soamv
Some excellent technical info lower down in the thread:
<http://greeksky.gr/GreekSkyForum/index.php?topic=2.msg9#msg9>

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benjoffe
This is amazing, I wonder if most of the process could be automated and sold
as a kit.

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hydrazine
This is breathtaking.. An automated tool would definitely be useful and
welcomed, but half the challenge and reward is also staying the 30+ hours to
capture the image.

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yaseming
this is ridiculously cool. congratulations on the beautifully executing your
plan.

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ericmsimons
I've never heard of the "Polaris Circle" before. That is unbelievably cool.

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biot
The "Polaris semicircle" is an informal description of the arc that the star
Polaris made due to the 11 hour exposure. Had it been a 6 hour exposure and he
wanted to point out a different star, he might have labeled it as the "HR2742
quarter circle".

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ericmsimons
Ah, makes much more sense now! What I really meant then is that I've never
seen any star in the "circular" shape shown in the pic

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mohsen
beautiful

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alnayyir
I hate to be _that guy_ but does this really need to exist here instead of on
Digg/Reddit/Fark/etc?

Flagged for now.

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michael_dorfman
Wow. Let's take a look again at the guidelines, shall we?

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting._

Check. I don't know about you, but I found this to be a very creative hack.

 _That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a
sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity._

Check. Definitely satisfied _my_ intellectual curiosity.

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._

Check. Nowhere to be found here.

 _Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures._

Check. Likewise, none of the above.

 _If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._

Check. Definitely not a story for TV news.

Summary: Looks like a perfect fit to me.

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alnayyir
This is the problem with a blacklist. This has nothing to do with intellectual
curiosity, it's eye candy.

This is pretty typical blogspam material, your over-literal misunderstanding
of what constitutes off-topic notwithstanding.

I bite my tongue every time I get the urge to remark upon the trajectory of
HN, and instead I take the high-road.

I mark each case-by-case and I _never_ flag without explanation unless it's
patently spam.

In return, I get people bickering with me over the letter of the law of what
constitutes off-topic in defense of pictorial blogspam and downvotes.

Between this and the torrent of personality-blog mountebanks (who are defended
by their sycophants), I'm tempted to just go back to being a code hermit.

You should know better, you've been a member as long as I have. Albeit
unnecessary to see how specious the value of this post is.

Edit: On reflection, I'll stop bothering to explain my flags in future since
the culture has shifted to downvoting in dissent.

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michael_dorfman
I don't care much for these meta-discussions, but I think there's an
interesting issue here, possibly worth pursuing a bit.

First, let's separate the wheat from the chaff. We're not talking, in this
case, about personality-blog mountebanks, or sycophants. Nor are we talking
about blogspam (under any definition I can imagine.) Nor, finally, are we
discussing any "over-literal misunderstanding of what constitutes off-topic"
or "the letter of the law".

What is at stake here is "what satisfies one's intellectual curiosity?"
Because that is the guiding principle at play.

For me, this article definitely fit the bill. The idea of taking a 360 degree
panoramic photo is nothing new, but to take it over a period of 24 hours was
(in my estimation) a brilliant masterstroke. To me, it showed the kind of
"hacker" approach that we tend to admire around these parts.

Now, as you say, you and I have both been around here for quite a while, so it
surprised me a bit that we have such different estimation about what makes for
a good HN submission.

I think that explaining flags is a good thing. But saying _"does this really
need to exist here instead of on Digg/Reddit/Fark/etc?"_ isn't really enough
for me to understand the nature of your objection. I get that it might not
satisfy your intellectual curiosity as it does mine, but is that really worth
a flag?

