European astronaut Thomas Pesquet returned to Earth last month after spending six months aboard the International Space Station, capturing the first Street View imagery captured beyond our planet:

[T]he Street View team worked with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to design gravity-free method of collecting the imagery using DSLR cameras and equipment already on the ISS. Then I collected still photos in space, that were then sent down to Earth where they were stitched together to create panoramic 360 degree imagery of the ISS.

You can read about the mission on the Google Blog & check out the behind-the-scenes process here:

[YouTube]

Check out some wonderful work from National Geographic photographer Anand Varma. Interesting details:

A 2013 University of Toronto study concluded that if hummingbirds were the size of an average human, they’d need to drink more than one 12-ounce can of soda for every minute they’re hovering, because they burn sugar so fast.

Kottke adds,

some hummingbirds can beat their wings 100 times in a second and can sip nectar 15 times per second. I also like the locals’ name for the Cuban bee hummingbird, the world’s smallest bird: zunzuncito (little buzz buzz).

“Our virtual photographer ‘travelled’ ~40,000 panoramas in areas like the Alps, Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada, Big Sur in California and Yellowstone National Park,” hunting for the best compositions, writes Hui Fang of the Google Research team.

Per PetaPixel, “Once it finds a nice-looking photo, it uses post-processing techniques to improve the look of the shot like photographers do in Photoshop or Lightroom. Edits include cropping, tweaking saturation, applying HDR effects, adding dramatic lighting with ‘content-aware brightness adjustments.’”

Potentially interesting sidenote: In 2013, before Google Photos became a standalone product, Google+ was backing up & applying semantic Auto Enhance to more than half a billion photos per day. The process mimicked the edits a skilled human would apply (e.g. treating skin differently from skies, sharpening & brightening). This all happened automatically, so almost no one noticed, and when we turned it off, almost no one cared (cf. bad wine). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here’s some trippy, claw-level view footage thanks to an eagle making off with researcher Matt Beedle’s GoPro:

So, how did they actually get the camera back? PetaPixel writes, “Thankfully, his father had seen the branch the eagle had landed on, and the two men searched for hours over two days before they managed to find the camera and the footage within.”

[YouTube]

I’m ready for my close-up… and my close-up, and my close-up, and my 100+ other close-ups.

“Based on the ‘Hoberman Sphere,’ (a geodesic dome which folds down to a much smaller size due to a plethora of joints)” notes PetaPixel (where you can see more images of it), “this dome can pop-up in an instant holding an army of DSLR cameras. Potentially over 100, if you were wondering.”

Robert McIntosh masterfully pilots his tiny homebrew drone over—and through—the landscape of Muscle Beach, resulting in this eye-popping video: 

Before you join me in saying, “Damn it, why does my drone footage always look like comparatively shite,” notice that he heavily stabilized his images using ReelSteady for Adobe After Effects, and that he was willing to endure quite a few crashes along the way. You can see the unstabilized footage & some mishaps here:

According to Cinema 5D,

Mcintosh claims to have used the “world’s smallest HD drone” which he describes as follows: The drone weighs in at an astonishing 94.7 grams WITH the stripped down Gopro! (120 grams takeoff weight with lipo flight battery and foam roll cage)For reference, a stock Gopro Hero 5 black weighs 118 grams!It’s less that 5″ wide and 3″ tall, Sporting 2″ propellers.

As Jim might say, “This is the strangest life I’ve ever known…”