Snapping the Milky Way, art inspired by SLAC blueprints, doppelganger magazine covers

Top tip: use a remote shutter control. (Courtesy: Clifton Cameras)

By Hamish Johnston

If you are lucky enough to live somewhere with dark skies, you know that the Milky Way is a truly majestic sight. But how exactly would you go about capturing its magnificence with a camera? UK-based Clifton Cameras has put together an infographic with a few helpful hints. The image above is an excerpt and you can view the entire infographic here.

The late June Schwarcz was a renowned American enamel artist whose husband Leroy Schwarcz was an engineer who oversaw the early construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in California. That’s how June got hold of mechanical drawings of SLAC components that she turned into wonderful objects of art. Her work is the subject of a retrospective exhibit June Schwarcz: Invention and Variation that runs until 27 August at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. You can read more about June and Leroy Schwarcz in “SLAC accelerator plans appear in Smithsonian art exhibit”, which includes several photos of June’s work.

Reunited: Scientific Computing World and Physics World. (Courtesy: Connor Macrae)

I joined IOP Publishing – which publishes Physics World – more than 20 years ago and the first magazine that I worked on was Scientific Computing World. We sold that magazine many years ago and it is still going strong, as we discovered this week when Connor Macrae Tweeted the above photograph of the July issues of both magazines. Great minds think alike. Macrae’s tweet has inspired several spoof covers, which you can see here.