Seen out the window, heading towards Heathrow

"It's a bird!" "It's Superman!" "No, it's an aeroplane!"

(Not often you get to use that order.)

There were two 'planes, presumably making test flights. And then they were gone, and the vapour trails faded, and it was as if they had never been.

Finally, for anyone who hasn't already seen it, the real cause of the travel chaos.

Hugin

I was telling rysmiel the other day about the photo-stitching program Hugin, and thought I'd post an example here, to raise its profile.

Here's a panoramic I took when dhole took me and Clara WINOLJ hiking in Ein Gedi. At the time I posted a version crudely stitched together by myself manually:

( Overt mosaic )

As you can just about make out in this low resolution version, the component photographs never quite align perfectly, due to perspective distortions induced by mapping an image onto an image plane of varying distance from the focal point. (This is why your eyeballs are spheres and not flat like the back of a camera!) Also, for the same reason the edge of each photo is darker, and so the joins are very overt.

Now here's the same panoramic as assembled from its component photographs automatically by Hugin, at the touch of a button:

( Seamless mosaic )

The result is seamless and, I hope even at this low resolution, speaks for itself.

About 90% of the time Hugin works very well; the other 10% of the time it goes completely off its trolley^*; but there is the backup option of aligning the photos manually by clicking on common points in each image. Once a panoramic is assembled, it allows you the option of straightening wonky horizons, and then gives you a choice of projections to use for the final result. (I don't think I got the horizon quite right on this example, but it was an example where I had before and after versions readily to hand, to demonstrate Hugin...)

* Insert reference to tram lines here...

Eyjafjallajökull

mmseason's suggestion on papersky's blog to listen to the sound clips on the Language Log post about the pronunciation of "Eyjafjallajökull" was all well and good except that it left my brain going "Eyjafjallajökull... Eyjafjallajökull... Eyjafjallajökull..." I had to put on some music to get rid of it.

I wonder how unusual I am that I first encountered jökull as a child, reading A Journey to the Centre of the Earth:

‘See this island of volcanoes’, said the professor, ‘and notice that they all bear the name “jökull”. This means “glacier” in Icelandic and, at that northerly latitude, most of the eruptions reach the light of day through the layers of ice. Hence this name “jökull” applied to all the fire-producing peaks of the island.’

Given the geekiness of my f-list, or friends-of-friends at any rate, not very, I would imagine.