In Japan || Daniel Kordan
Source: 35photo.pro
Predictable, but damn funny anyway...Love it
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There was a bit of an arms race in early ballooning between people who wanted to use hot air to lift balloons and those who wanted to use lighter-than-air gases like hydrogen.
The hot-air devotees, led by the brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier had an early lead in the race. They had watched fire ashes lift into the air and wondered whether the smoke — which they thought was a lighter-than-air product of the fires — could lift people, too. They experimented with small balloons, then larger ones made of burlap sealed with several layers of paper inside.
Finally, they launched the first unmanned hot-air balloon in June 1783 at Annonay, France, in front of a crowd of dignitaries. The balloon — without a basket or any kind of payload — ascended several thousand feet over the course of about 10 minutes.
The hydrogen users weren’t far behind. A French scientist named Jacques Charles designed a balloon made of silk with a rubber coating and painstakingly filled it with hydrogen in central Paris. This took days, and it became a curiosity; crowds gathered and gawked at the slowly inflating balloon.
When Charles finally launched his craft — again, with a crowd of important people in attendance, including Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France at the time — it flew a little better than the Montgolfiers’ effort, traveling several miles over 45 minutes. But when the balloon landed, local farmers attacked and destroyed it.
After the first manned balloon flights, ballooning became a popular obsession, especially in its homeland of France. One man wrote,
Among all our circle of friends, at all our meals, in the antechambers of our lovely women, as in the academic schools, all one hears is talk of experiments, atmospheric air, inflammable gas, flying cars, journeys in the sky.
Balloons were everywhere, especially on consumer goods. It seemed that everybody wanted images of balloons in their homes.
They adorned snuffboxes:
Watches:
and tea caddies:
Even far from France, you could find images of balloons everywhere. In Japan, a country that wouldn’t have its own manned balloon launch for almost a century, you could buy a hot-air balloon plate, manufactured in 1797:
Knaresborough is a market and spa town and civil parish in the Borough of Harrogate, in North Yorkshire, England, on the river Nidd. It is 3 miles east of Harrogate.
Source: tumblr.com
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed the well-known Ring Nebula in unprecedented detail. Formed by a star throwing off its outer layers as it runs out of fuel, the Ring Nebula is an archetypal planetary nebula. This new image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows intricate details of the filament structure of the inner ring. There are some 20,000 dense globules in the nebula, which are rich in molecular hydrogen. In contrast, the inner region shows very hot gas. The main shell contains a thin ring of enhanced emission from carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University)
William Alberto Huaman Vilcatoma
Guilin Mountains China
these landscapes are great bc you see these chinese paintings showing what you think are very stylized landforms, but then you see photographs of the actual mountains in south china and it’s like, no, that’s actually just what they look like
iirc these kinds of insanely dramatic peaks are characteristic of karst topography, since soft limestone is easily eroded and can create some pretty wild shapes in the process. some of the really insane ones include the stone forest (also in southern china) and tsingy de bemaraha in madagascar.
needless to say you often also get incredible caves in karst regions, even ones which don’t have nearly as dramatic surface features as these
