One of the things that struck me while at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this month, was the offhand way that Flickr's Stewart Butterfield referred to users of Flickr as not only owners and users, but as curators. He did not appear to make a big deal about that word, but it struck a resonant chord in my brain. I'm not one for many family photos, but there are definitely images I love to share - even if I did not take them.

In that light, if you have a spare moment, I invite you to drop in and have a look at my new Photoset on Flickr, Cassini at Saturn.

I've been fanatic about space exploration since I was a kid, and have been giddy the past year or so with the constant feed of imagery from Mars and Saturn. I've been trolling the 35,000+ images from Saturn ever since they started coming online (I scraped together some ugly RSS feeds to assist). All of the images in this photoset come from NASA's JPL website. They are the best of the lot, in my judgment. As self-appointed curator, I chose 101 images that spoke to me, and that I thought would speak to others. Especially the ones that made me say "whoa" to myself the first time I saw them. Generally emphasizing aesthetics over science, but it's all a big mix.

Acting on Stewart's unintended advice, I can happily gather and display these images - and I feel free to hype them, since it is not my work at all, just my presentation of some amazing work done by a great crew of others, and a very lonely satellite, the size of a School Bus, looping around Saturn, some 800 million miles away.
 

0 Comments +