It looks really cool!, but I don't understand how it is a 24 hour shot. It just looks like a tiny planet with a house on top. Could somebody please explain the image?
(The description by the author in the post is complicated)
Think of it as a wide 360 degree panorama picture stitched from images taken at different times of the day. This would yield a wide, non-distorted rectangular image.
This one combined image was then rolled around itself in such a way that its whole bottom edge is now in the center of this "planetary" image, and its top edge is now the outer circumference of the image (the border with black).
If you're wondering why the center point of the image is not heavily distorted it's because it was overlaid with a simple top-down photo of the place the tripod was standing on.
This is breathtaking.. An automated tool would definitely be useful and welcomed, but half the challenge and reward is also staying the 30+ hours to capture the image.
The "Polaris semicircle" is an informal description of the arc that the star Polaris made due to the 11 hour exposure. Had it been a 6 hour exposure and he wanted to point out a different star, he might have labeled it as the "HR2742 quarter circle".
Wow. Let's take a look again at the guidelines, shall we?
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
Check. I don't know about you, but I found this to be a very creative hack.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Check. Definitely satisfied my intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Check. Nowhere to be found here.
Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.
Check. Likewise, none of the above.
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is the problem with a blacklist. This has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity, it's eye candy.
This is pretty typical blogspam material, your over-literal misunderstanding of what constitutes off-topic notwithstanding.
I bite my tongue every time I get the urge to remark upon the trajectory of HN, and instead I take the high-road.
I mark each case-by-case and I never flag without explanation unless it's patently spam.
In return, I get people bickering with me over the letter of the law of what constitutes off-topic in defense of pictorial blogspam and downvotes.
Between this and the torrent of personality-blog mountebanks (who are defended by their sycophants), I'm tempted to just go back to being a code hermit.
You should know better, you've been a member as long as I have. Albeit unnecessary to see how specious the value of this post is.
Edit: On reflection, I'll stop bothering to explain my flags in future since the culture has shifted to downvoting in dissent.
I don't care much for these meta-discussions, but I think there's an interesting issue here, possibly worth pursuing a bit.
First, let's separate the wheat from the chaff. We're not talking, in this case, about personality-blog mountebanks, or sycophants. Nor are we talking about blogspam (under any definition I can imagine.) Nor, finally, are we discussing any "over-literal misunderstanding of what constitutes off-topic" or "the letter of the law".
What is at stake here is "what satisfies one's intellectual curiosity?" Because that is the guiding principle at play.
For me, this article definitely fit the bill. The idea of taking a 360 degree panoramic photo is nothing new, but to take it over a period of 24 hours was (in my estimation) a brilliant masterstroke. To me, it showed the kind of "hacker" approach that we tend to admire around these parts.
Now, as you say, you and I have both been around here for quite a while, so it surprised me a bit that we have such different estimation about what makes for a good HN submission.
I think that explaining flags is a good thing. But saying "does this really need to exist here instead of on Digg/Reddit/Fark/etc?" isn't really enough for me to understand the nature of your objection. I get that it might not satisfy your intellectual curiosity as it does mine, but is that really worth a flag?
