Visible to the naked eye, a spectacular supernova occurred in 1604. It was noticed by luminaries of the day, including astronomer Johannes Kepler, and left behind a beautiful remnant, now known as SN 1604 or Kepler’s supernova remnant. This image combines observations of the remnant from three different NASA telescopes to produce a dazzling result.
Thousands of years ago, a giant star exploded. It’s light may have been noticed by people on Earth, though no one seems to have recorded it. But modern astronomers can see the filaments it left behind in this remnant, DEM L 190, located about 170,000 light-years away.
The oldest recorded supernova is this one, RCW 86, located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Circinus. It was noted nearly 2,000 years ago (in 185 A.D.) as a “guest star” in Chinese astronomical documents. Light from the supernova was visible for nearly eight months in the sky before it faded, leaving this amazing remnant behind.
Image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO & ESA; Infared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Williams (NCSU)
In 1006 A.D., a new star appeared to astronomers all over the world. It was recorded in documents across China, Japan, Europe, and the Arab world. Supernova 1006, as it is now known, can be seen expanding outward from its center, which is nearly 7,000 light-years from Earth.
The thin, ropy filaments of this nebula, Simeis 147, might make you a bit hungry. It has been given the moniker Spaghetti nebula and it the remains of a supernova that exploded 40,000 years ago in the constellation Taurus, about 3,000 light-years away.
Image: Davide De Martin & the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator
In 1987, astronomers were given a treat when light from nearby star’s supernova reached Earth. Visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, SN 1987A was one of the closest supernovas seen with modern telescopes, helping scientists to understand the underlying dynamics of these events. Detectors online at the time recorded neutrinos originating from SN 1987A, which went a long way in helping dispel a later observation that neutrinos could travel faster than light.
Image: Dr. Christopher Burrows, NASA, ESA/STScI, and Hubble Heritage Team
One of the few supernovas to be observed with the naked eye and recorded during the modern scientific era was SN 1572, or Tycho’s supernova. In November of 1572, this “new star” appeared in the sky and was observed by many scientists, particularly astronomer Tycho Brahe. This composite image from several telescopes shows some of the beautiful structure within the supernova remnant.
Image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO, Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: MPIA, Calar Alto, O.Krause et al.
The long supernova remnant W50 can be seen in radio wavelengths in this image. Some astronomers, particularly those from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, think it bears a striking resemblance to a manatee and recently gave it the name Manatee nebula. It joins a long list of animal-shaped nebula that we recently chronicled.
Image: NRAO/AUI/NSF, K. Golap, M. Goss; NASA’s Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE)
The murmurs, whispers, shrieks and growls of 9,000 species are now digitized in a huge library of animal sounds, including some songs that will never be sung again.
Housed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Macaulay Library’s audio archive contains roughly 150,000 high-resolution recordings, all available online. It’s the largest collection of wildlife sounds in the world, and routinely called upon by students, scholars, scientists, and filmmakers.
“Sound has a remarkable ability to transport someone,” said audio curator Greg Budney. “You play a sound, and it’s as though the person or the animal is alive, right there in the room with you.”
Digitizing the collection took 12 years. Now, the 10 terabytes of tracks have a total playback time of more than 7,500 hours. Supplementing that auditory cacophony are thousands of video clips, and a photo archive is on the way.
The collection’s inaugural recording dates back to 1929, when a song sparrow, rose-breasted grosbeak, and house wren were recorded singing near the shores of Cayuga Lake. The youngest bird in the collection is an ostrich – recorded while still in its egg. Whales, cicadas, hippos, and even the environmental soundscape of an Indian temple await listeners.
Also tucked into the collection are recordings of the now-extinct Kauai Oo and the (most-likely) extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. Preserving these natural sounds for future generations is certainly one of the collection’s functions, but Budney points to others.
“If you want people to have an appreciation for places they might never go, or animals they’ve never seen, sound really makes it alive for them,” he said. “But then, also in the collection, are fantastic discoveries waiting to be made.”
Already, the collection has revealed geographic differences in the tunes some birds sing, and helped scientists identify new bird species; biologists are using the recordings to better understand animal behavior; and the decades of data can tell scientists how vocalizations have changed over the years.
But it’s not just for experts: Anyone can contribute to the collection, and anyone can listen to it.
Two of Budney’s favorite sounds include the substrate-based vibrations of treehoppers – tiny, crazy-looking insects that send signals zinging through the stems and branches on which they perch – and the wing-beats of the ruffed grouse, which can be heard up to a quarter-mile away. “It sounds like someone starting up an old VW bus,” he said.
A bell-like walrus, otherworldly bird song, the hidden realm of insects, “There are sounds like this going on all around the world,” Budney said. “And we’re just beginning to learn about them, just beginning to tap into them.”
Now, archivists are working on adding more than 50,000 raw recordings to the already-expansive repository, a favored resource of filmmakers. Ken Burns consulted the Macaulay Library holdings while creating his National Parks series. Harry Potter’s audio team needed help finding something that sounded like a hippogriff. And Skywalker Sound sought some audio help while working on The Incredibles.
Tucked into the collection are all kinds of gems. Here, we’ve compiled a few of our favorites in audio quiz format. Have a listen. Is that an interstellar spaceship? Are those haunting howls coming from a mammal? A bird? What on Earth sounds like…that?
For those wading into the archive on their own, Budney has a few tips: Search by animal, or by geographic area. The first search results returned for a species are the best recordings. Learn songs or sounds a few at a time. And enjoy!
“One of the potent aspects of this archive that moves it out of the realm of just being a menagerie of wildlife sounds and into a real conservation and research resource is that technology is advancing our understanding of how animals use sounds,” Budney said.
Photo: Thomas Lersch/Wikimedia
Honorable Mention (Video)
Living corals form a fluorescent kaleidoscope of awesomeness when imaged with a non-invasive confocal microscope and laser. This video, produced by a team at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, takes viewers on a trip through Alice's Disco-Inspired Undersea Wonderland. Bright red, blue, and green, corals anchor dynamic and essential communities, and are much more active than one might realize. Bonus: Bach and Vivaldi.
Credit: Christine Farrar, Zac H. Forsman, Ruth D. Gates, Jo-Ann C. Leong, Robert J. Toonen; Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honorable Mention (Games and Apps)
Build the moon, pummel it with asteroids, and pour a lava ocean over the nascent crescent.This computer game, called Selene II, helps players learn geophysical and space science concepts by presenting lessons visually, following the same paths a scientist might take to solve problems. Behind the scenes, the game analyzes and tracks players' performance, using algorithms that collect information on how and when concepts are learned and absorbed.
Credit: Debbie Denise Reese, Robert E. Kosko, Charles A. Wood, and Cassie Lightfritz, CyGaMEs Project, Center for Educational Technologies, Wheeling Jesuit University; Barbara G. Tabachnick, University of California, Northridge
The tendency of dead fish to lose their color has skewed our images of them. Atlantic cod, typically depicted in dull brown, "are one of the most misunderstood in terms of coloration," Prosek said. "When they come out of the water, they're all spotted and beautiful. I had no idea they had so much coloration."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Prosek's dissatisfaction with species names raises a thorny question: What does it actually mean to look at a black sea bass (above) but not see a black sea bass, inasmuch as the name conveys generalizations about its lineage? At a basic level, classifications and names are inescapable. To communicate is to name.
For Prosek, the key is to understand that a species "is not separate from everything else, but is part of this fluid, continuous thing," including a creature's locale. In the Ocean Fish paintings, each fish is accompanied by depictions of other organisms found in its extended world — in this case, a quahog clam and beach plums.
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Within moments of death, fish often begin to lose their color. This process was captured nicely in the movie version of The Life of Pi, said Prosek, when computer-generated mahi mahi like the one painted above are shown "with the lights of the fish going out as they die."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Once described by the New York Times as "the Audubon of fish," Prosek finds the comparison flattering but in some ways misleading.
"Audubon was painting a nature that was just being discovered by Europeans," he said. "Painting now is a very different process. I always feel like I'm in the process of depicting something we're losing very quickly." Nassau grouper like the one above are an endangered species, as are many of the subjects in Ocean Fishes.
Like Audubon, Prosek is a conservationist. (He even founded World Trout, an organization devoted to preserving native trout populations.) His task is a struggle, however, and not only because trout are threatened by development and climate change.
Conservation as an ideal is struggling, often unable to articulate why the well-being of a particular subspecies is more important than a profit, invoking nebulous ideals of biodiversity or making ecosystem service arguments that leave little room for sentiment, much less a pocket of trout that evolved for 10,000 years in the headwaters of a Croatian stream.
For Prosek, engaging with individual animals is an alternative to the usual conservation arguments — the seeds, he hopes, of a new conservation ethos.
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Of all animals, fish are the hardest to see in their natural environments, and this makes it difficult to appreciate them in way people do birds or mammals. For some, such as the Spanish mackerel above, it's almost easier to picture them as filets than actual creatures.
"We don't have the opportunity to see them alive, in living colors," said Prosek. "That's part of what I wanted to show people. These creatures are incredible, but you see them dead and pale in a market. You're not getting that privileged view from the water."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Some assumptions are so deeply ingrained that it's difficult to imagine the world from another perspective. Take taxonomy: We're raised to see nature through an essentially 18th century system of classification, one rooted in the urge to impose order on a vibrant, messy world.
Not that there's anything wrong with order, of course, and taxonomies are quite useful. But sometimes, says artist James Prosek, they get in the way. We perceive names instead of beings, representative types instead of individual animals pulsing with life.
"I'm interested in exploring how we might be able to communicate nature differently," Prosek said. "The way we communicate nature affects the way we perceive and treat it."
Prosek rose to natural history acclaim in 1997, when Trout: An Illustrated History earned him comparisons to John James Audubon, the great naturalist and painter whose name is now synonymous with nature's beauty.
Like Audubon, Prosek is a conservationist, but in the years following Trout, written while Prosek was still an undergraduate, his art evolved beyond natural history. Prosek still employs the visual language of that tradition, but he now challenges its conventions.
In Ocean Fishes, his new book and collection of paintings, Prosek urges people to see nature, and especially the fish he loves so dearly, in a new light: Forget taxonomic checkboxes and biodiversity and ecosystem services, and think about a single creature's life.
On the following pages, Prosek takes Wired on a tour of his new work.
Above:Each of the paintings in Ocean Fishes is life-sized and modeled on an individual fish that Prosek saw in person, alive and still flushed with colors that fade within moments of death. To paint this blue marlin, he traveled to the Cape Verde islands off West Africa. At fifteen feet long, it's the largest of the new paintings.
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Prosek's paintings can be seen in the book Ocean Fish. They'll also be on display at the National Arts Club in New York City from February 19 to March 2.
"I'm not against the Linnaean system of classification," he said. "I'm just offering my own personal taxonomy, the visual taxonomy of an artist who really likes these fish."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
Prosek's first book, Trout of the World, grew out of his boyhood love of trout, an enthusiasm pursued in a pre-internet age by writing letters to biologist and poring through library tomes of natural history. At the beginning, recalls Prosek, he thought the classification of salmonids — the fish family spanning trout and salmon — into different species was biologically ordained.
The more Prosek learned, however, the more lines blurred. A blueback trout, for instance, is simply an Arctic char that happens to live in a different place. Rainbow trout and brown trout share an appellation, but are only distantly related. When the ranges of certain species overlap, such as cutthroat and rainbow trout, they often mate with one another and hybridize, despite their ostensible differences.
"What I'd thought of as a kid as some kind of rigid system, I learned was a complete mess," said Prosek. And whereas his early paintings were often based on illustrations and written descriptions, striving towards archetypal representations of species, Prosek's travels for his next projects — Fly-Fishing the 41st and Trout of the World — taught him that even individuals of the same subspecies were often quite different.
As much as Prosek loved natural history's illustrations, he realized that the notion of archetype was an illusion, too. Out of this came his decision to paint single, specific individuals in Ocean Fishes.
"I wanted to make it clear that I wasn't painting a fish to represent a species in a field guide, but an individual. This is one fish I saw," said Prosek, who saw the bluefin tuna above harpooned in Cape Cod Bay. "But from doing that, I learned that even if you've seen the fish, you still can't depict a fish as dynamic and constantly changing as a tuna. When you pull a tuna out of the water, it's pulsing with color and life. It's like a reflection on the water. You can't capture that in one picture."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)
The Earth as seen from the Moon. LROC NAC mosaic of images snapped on 12 June 2010 during a calibration sequence, E130954785L and E130954785R.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center built and manages the mission for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera was designed to acquire data for landing site certification and to conduct polar illumination studies and global mapping. Operated by Arizona State University, LROC consists of a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). The mission is expected to return over 70 terabytes of image data.
Image: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University [high-resolution]
Caption: NASA
