THE MOST AMAZING SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK XVI

Mathematical Snow Art And Other Amazing Photos From This Week
By Colin Lecher, Popular Science, 4 January 2013.

Including a gigantic airship, an abandoned Soviet theme park, and more…

1. Snow Fractals

Credit: Simon Beck via This Is Colossal

Simon Beck tramps through the snow at Les Arcs ski resort in France, slowly making these beautiful snowflakes. They're so complex, he regularly models them on computers before attempting them on foot. [More at This Is Colossal]

2. Car, Park

Credit: Toni Wang and Tao via enpundit

At this "car park" in Taiwan, an installation makes the cars look like they're submerged under grass. [More at enpundit]

3. Abandoned Amusement Park

Credit: Gregor via Dark Roasted Blend

Dark Roasted Blend posted a collection of photos from an abandoned Soviet amusement park. They're eerie, obviously, but also fascinating.

4. Rigid Aircraft

Credit: Aeroscraft via Gizmodo

Meet Aeroscraft. It's...a kind of aircraft that's not a blimp or an airplane. Either way, it looks awesome.

5. Zipper Furniture

Credit: project [zip:per] via designboom

Korean design studio The Zoom created a series of these odd (suggestive?) pieces of zippered furniture.

6. Cornelia Crater

NASA's Dawn mission beams back images of the giant asteroid Vesta, like this composite-colour view of the Cornelia Crater. Photos like this help scientists examine mysterious, black material covering the surface.

7. Firefighters

During a fire in China, a photographer caught this perfectly framed shot of the wreckage. You can check out more photojournalism from this week over at American Photo.

8. Helpful Planets

This is a first-ever event: astronomers caught a glimpse of planets helping their star grow. When the ALMA telescope looked, this is the image it saw. Read more about the discovery here.

9. Ruined Cars

Credit: Phil DIg via Jalopnik

If you can't tell, those are all cars. When Sandy blew through the East Coast, it totalled a lot of rides in the process. A lot of those were moved to Long Island's little-used Calverton Executive Airpark. See a fly-over video here. [More at Jalopnik]

10. Cities By Starlight

Credit: Thierry Cohen via Architizer

What would cities look like without all that light pollution? Photographer Thierry Cohen tried to find out by photographing metropolises by day, then digitally darkening them and adding in vibrant night skies.

11. Imaginary Cities

Credit: Dan Tobin Smith and Rachel Thomas via It's Nice That

And speaking of different ways to look at cities, photographer Dan Tobin Smith and designer Rachel Thomas set up polystyrene cities like this above eight-square-meter "lakes" of milk. They're all unreal.

12. Omega Centauri

For New Year's, NASA and Penn State released a ton of new space images, like this one showing the stars of Omega Centauri. It might not take you a year to see them all, but it's something to tie you over until next week.

[Source: Popular Science. Edited.]