Chaco Culture National Historic Park is a great place for amateur astronomy. Its remote location, climate, altitude and facilities have made it a popular destination for night sky viewing. This weekend I was lucky enough to try my hand at astrophotography. Having (literally) photographed nearly every place in Chaco Canyon over the last decade (see Traditions of the Sun), it seemed natural to try to point my camera skyward.
The photograph below is my first attempt at astrophotography. Early Friday morning at 5AM, I’ll be trying again. I’m hoping to capture NASA’s LCROSS impact of the moon. This mission will measure the concentration of water ice in the permanently shadowed areas of the moon. Ideum developed an exhibit for NASA’s Lunar Robotics program, so we’ve been following this all along. (Update 9-5-09: NASA Just posted a viewing guide for the event.)
The photograph above was taken with a Canon 20D. Amateur astronomer Brad Hamlin set up the 18″ telescope. This image was shot with a 20mm eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens. And, yes, I did clean the image up a bit in Photoshop. Below are some other shots I took at Chaco Canyon earlier in day and the next morning.
The amazing architecture of the great house of Pueblo Bonito.
The beautiful sandstone veneer of Pueblo Bonito.
We saw elk on the way out of the park Sunday morning. This view was from the dirt road (NM 57) in the southern part of Chaco Culture.
If you’re interested in seeing more photographs of Chaco Canyon. I’ve posted quite a few to the blog over the last few years. Check out the category “Chaco Culture National Historical Park.” You can see more photographs, including high-resolution versions of images that appear in this post, on Ideum’s Flickr photostream.
Just last week we completed an installation of a multitouch, multiuser table exhibit and two multitouch enabled kiosks for Vulcan Park and Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham Today exhibition space has floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and provides a dramatic view of the city. For exhibits, we worked closely with the museum and focused on exploring Birmingham and the surrounding region through interactive maps, panoramic images, and community-provided photography.
Like the touch table exhibit, these kiosks use NUI Snowflake software with custom Flash software which we developed. The panoramic viewer allows for simple pinch gesture to zooming of a panoramic photograph that we took from a top the Vulcan Park statue. Users can also flip (or flick) photographs in a photo viewer window that is connected to points of interest on the panoramic image. We designed and developed the stand and exhibit-case for the HP TouchSmart. This platform provides a low-cost touch and multiouch platform for computer exhibits. There’s more about the panoramic viewer application in our portfolio.
Here are some photographs for the opening party for Birmingham Today.
Visitors interact with the interactive map and photographs of Birmingham.
You couldn’t tear some visitors away from the touch table.
The multitouch-enabled panoramic viewers were placed by the large windows in the gallery space allows visitors to explore the Birmingham Skyline.
Earlier this week, we installed our first multitouch table at the Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas. The touch table is right in the entranceway to the museum near a large satellite photograph of Amarillo and its’ environs.
The table runs a custom mulituser, multitouch application we developed with the Don Harrington Discovery Center and Vulcan Park and Museum. This multitouch mashup application uses Flickr and Yahoo! Maps. There is more on the design and software development process on the Ideum portfolio. The video below shows some of the features found in the application.
The press came out to see the exhibit. The local newspaper and all three network news channels showed up. Below DHDC’s Executive Director, Joe Hastings got interviewed by the local press.
Our next installation is in two weeks in Birmingham, Alabama. We’re going be installing another table along with two multitouch enabled HP TouchSmart kiosks. As far as we know, this will be the first time multitouch technology has been used exclusively throughout a permanent exhibit space.
This weekend, I headed up to Chaco Culture National Historic Park on the summer solstice to see traditional dancers. The Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice since 2000, and I’ve been lucky enough to be at four out of the last five (you can see photos from 2004, 2006, 2007, and there are lots more photos of Chaco Culture at the Traditions of the Sun Website.)
The dancers perform in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. For those of you who’ve never been to Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito is largest of all the great houses found in the park, with nearly six hundred rooms, and it was three stories in some parts. Pueblo Bonito was built around 1000 AD and was continually built on for a few hundred years afterward, until the Chacoans left the area in 13th Century. Pueblo Bonito is a truly dramatic setting and it is a very emotional experience for those who dance; Chaco is the home of their ancestors after all.
This year the group of dancers were from Acoma Pueblo (which is the oldest, continually inhabited community in the U.S.). Below are some photos from their two morning dances. There are a few more photographs, including high-resolution versions on the Ideum Flickr site.
Dancing in the Plaza.
Marking the start of summer.
The two youngest dancers hold beautiful Acoma pottery.
Two projects we helped design and develop have won awards at this year’s Museums and the Web Conference held in Montreal.
ExhibitFiles won the Best of the Web award in the museum professionals category. Congratulations to our partners the Association of Science-Technology Centers and Indepedent Exhibits, and to our advisors and the many members of the ExhibitFiles.
The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. won the Best of the Web award in the exhibition category which included over 40 nominees. Congratulations to everyone at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. The judges had great things to say about the project, you can view their comments on the conference forum.
The always interesting VRMag online magazine has a new issue out (#28). This issue contains amazing QuickTime VR panoramas of the closed area of Chernobyl (apparently no dose of radiation is too high in the pursuit of panoramic imagery!), along with some wonderful images of Havana, Cuba. This issue also has a republished version of my review of the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden, which first appeared in the ExhibitFiles. Along with the republished text, photographer Johnny Vaccaro has added some beautifully detailed full-screen panoramas of the Old Masters Gallery.
Earlier in the month, I had the opportunity to meet the VRMag Editorial Director Marco Trezzini in Lugano, Switzerland. (I taught a class at the University of Lugano as part of their TEC-CH Masters program.) It was great to finally have an opportunity to meet Marco and talk shop, as we’ve been in email contact for several years now. VRMag has covered our work since we got started back in 2000, along with the work of hundreds of other photographers and multimedia firms. VRMag and the VRWay site list dozens of feature stories and an extensive hotlist of panoramic images from around the world.
Update November 30th: BoingBoing (the #3 Blog in the world according to Technorati) has a post about VRMag, apparently John Gaeta “the Oscar-winning special effects guru behind The Matrix trilogy and the forthcoming Speed Racer film” has some very nice things to say about VRMag.
Here are more photographs of the Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers celebrating the Summer Solstice at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park. To witness the dances at Chaco was an amazing experience. As Fernando Cellicion, Director of the dance group, noted, “it is hard to describe the feeling that we have dancing at the same place where the same thing was happening thousands of years ago.”
Raydean Johnson (foreground) peforms the Turkey Dance. Also pictured: Belyle Johnson and Alexandra Nastacio.
Raydean Johnson and Xyla Johnson perform the Turkey Dance.
Dancers Xyla Johnson, Tanicia Nastacio, and Alexandra Nastacio perform the Pottery Dance.
Aldean Nastacio performs the Buffalo Dance.
Musicians Florentine Johnson (left) and Fernando Cellicion perform their original song, Redrocks.
Yesterday a few of us headed up to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to celebrate the summer solstice and to see and film dancers from Zuni Pueblo. Since 2001, the park and the Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice. Chaco is considered an ancestral homeland for the Pueblo people, so the events surrounding solstice at the park are quite powerful.
This week about 20 more photographs were added to the John Collier Jr. site on flickr (including this gem on the left taken in 1943 in Questa, New Mexico.) This is the first new set photos to be added since The American Image website went live back in January. (You can learn more about this project in our portfolio.) Our partners at the Maxwell Museum of the Anthropology will be adding more great Collier images over the next few months. The American Image site uses a flickr mashup, so as new photos are added they automatically appear within the Collection and inside the Shooting Script activity. Back on flickr, it was nice to see so many positive comments about the new photos. John Collier Jr. now has well over 100 contacts in flickr.
Along with the two photo mashups, the Propaganda Filmmaker a Flash-based online video editor that allows visitors to create their own short movies has been very active. (I posted more about the online video editor earlier this year.) Over 200 “propaganda films” have been made, with new ones appearing daily. Our visitors’ creativity in working with the 150 clips that are provided has shined through. An American Hero does a great job of telling a very literal story, while Oh! Irony! as the name suggests, conveys a very different message–all of this in less than 40 seconds! You can check out the Top Ten and the latest videos here, or make your own. It’s great to see what visitors will create when we develop interesting tools for them to use.
This Sunday the third Mayan World Alive! event will be held, this time in San Rafael, California at the Pickleweed Community Center. The event is free. (The previous two openings were held at the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco and the Governor’s palace in Merida, Mexico). This cultural event and exhibit will feature activities, music, dancing and a photographic exhibit showing some of the photographs we took for the Traditions of the Sun project last year. NASA’s website has more on the traveling photo exhibit.
Sunrise at Dzibilchaltun in the northen Yucatan. The building is known as the Sun Temple or the House of the Seven Dolls. This Late Classic building functioned as an observatory by marking the equinoxes, as well as the summer and winter solstices.
The Caracol, or Observatory at Chichen Itza served as an observatory for gathering astronomical data about the sun, moon, and planet Venus. Having the opportunity to shoot aerial photos was one of the highlights of the project. There is a slideshow with more aerial photograhs.
The Great Palace of Sayil is a beautiful and often overlooked struture. Sayil is located just a few kilometers from the more famous site of Uxmal.
El Castillo, or Castle, is the central pyramid of Chichen Itza. Notice the shadow on the right side of the pyramid. This appears as a great serpent which descends the staircase throughout the afternoon hours during the equinox. This photograph was taken in Spring of 2005. As you can see, huge crowds come to witness the event.
The photograph above was taken with a Canon 20D. Amateur astronomer Brad Hamlin set up the 18″ telescope. This image was shot with a 20mm eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens. And, yes, I did clean the image up a bit in Photoshop. Below are some other shots I took at Chaco Canyon earlier in day and the next morning.
The amazing architecture of the great house of Pueblo Bonito.
The beautiful sandstone veneer of Pueblo Bonito.
We saw elk on the way out of the park Sunday morning. This view was from the dirt road (NM 57) in the southern part of Chaco Culture.
The always interesting VRMag online magazine has a 
