At 1,013 meters (3,324 ft) in length with a total area of 8 hectares (19.77 acres), the swimming pool at the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Algarrobo, Chile is the largest in the world. It was listed officially as the largest swimming pool by area in the Guinness Book of World Records…
The Sifter has already featured photographs from NASA’s incredible archive (see here, here and here), and we continue that tradition with this series that documents the history of NASA’s various rocket launches from as early as 1950 up to 2003. Nothing captures the imagination like space travel, and these amazing images mark the beginning…
Photograph by Dayna Mason (daynoir on Flickr) Yesterday, Redditor jokes_on_you posted a fascinating magnetic field visualization using compasses (see above). What’s interesting is that we can not only see the pattern of magnetic fields, but the direction of those patterns via the compass arrows. As usual, the picture led to some interesting comments and…
Photograph by PHIL HART @ philhart.com | Prints available at Red Bubble Starting in late December of 2008 and ending in January of 2009, the shores of the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia were awash in a sea of glowing bioluminescent flagellate protists known as Noctiluca scintillans. This incredible phenomenon was captured brilliantly…
FRACTAL PATTERNS IN DRIED OUT DESERT RIVERS Photograph by ADRIANA FRANCO for National Geographic This incredible aerial photograph by Adrian Franco was selected as National Geographic’s Picture of the Day for April 9, 2012. In it we see the incredible fractal patterns rivers (now dried out) have made as they spread into…
On Saturday May 5, 2012, the lunar perigee coincided with a full moon. This fascinating event occurs about once a year. At its closest point the moon will be 222,000 miles (357,000 km) from Earth, causing high and low tides to be slightly more extreme than usual. [Source: The Telegraph] The exact numbers differ…
Photograph via mejjad The $100 million Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp (now ThyssenKrupp) for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo…
SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD Photograph by NASA In this jaw-dropping photo we see our beautiful planet Earth and the space shuttle Atlantis (STS-71) as seen from the Russian Federation Mir Station. Exact coordinates as follows: Latitude (LAT): 44.6 · Longitude (LON): 37.0 · Altitude (ALT): 210 Nautical Miles · Sun…
BORA BORA FROM SPACE Photograph by PLEIADES-HR SATELLITE This dramatic aerial photograph of Bora Bora was taken by France and Italy’s recently launched Pleidades-HR Satellite in January of 2012. The satellite orbits the Earth at an altitude of 694 km (431 miles). Pleiades is made of two “small satellites” (mass of one…
THE GIANT THREE STOREY INDOOR SLIDES IN MUNICH, GERMANY Photograph by MARTIN ROELL The Technische Universität München (TUM; University of Technology, Munich; Technical University of Munich) is a research university with campuses in Munich, Garching, and Weihenstephan. It is a member of TU9, an incorporated society of the largest and most notable…
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