As a Southern California native, I have seen my share of fires, but this year is different. Every year it is the same week -- the week before Halloween. As of this writing, there are 16 major fires burning in Southern California, all fueled by some of the driest weather I can remember, coupled by 90+ degree temperatures and of course, very strong Santa Ana winds (in excess of 80 mph gusts in some areas).
The closest fire to us, the Santiago fire, is about 10 miles due north from us and was started yesterday early evening by an arsonist.

Below is a Google Map maintained by the Orange County of all the active fires.


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And after the jump (click "read more..." below), you can see an amazing image captured by a NASA satellite today of Southern California. Read More...

Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, nasa, california, orange county

According to NASA's site, this image shows the initial ejecta that resulted when NASA's Deep Impact probe collided with comet Tempel 1 at 10:52 p.m. Pacific time, July 3 (1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4) . It was taken by the spacecraft's medium-resolution camera 16 seconds after impact.

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Tags: nasa

After seeing the images Hans Nyberg stitched together of the moon landings, I decided to go up to the NASA website and see what else they had posted. As it turns out, there is tons of stuff. What I thought was particularly cool was this image above (click on it to see a larger view) produced by a set of cameras with a slight offset to create this anaglyphic image. Get those 3D glasses out (you can buy 'em at that link--$2 with PayPal) and checkout the Mars surface in 3D!

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Tags: qtvr, nasa, panoramic, photography, visualization