2008, the year in photographs

The Big Picture has some absolutely amazing pictures.  They have put together a selection of the year’s best.

Absolutely amazing stuff here.  Some pictures might not be suitable for everyone.  Here are a few examples:

Ship
Locals and tourists walk around the Dutch ship Artemis which ran aground on the beach of les Sables d’Olonne, southern French Britanny, western France, March 10, 2008. The boat had been driven onto the coast by the wind blowing more than 130 km per hour. (REUTERS/Stephane Mahe)

Enc09_approach
This sequence of 12 frames was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft over a span of about 45 minutes on March 12, 2008. In that brief time, Cassini covered almost 40,000 kilometers in its approach to a flyby encounter with Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. The overexposure and smearing of the images gives a hint of the raw speed involved – 14.4 km/sec (or 32,211 mph). Shortly after this sequence, at its closest, Cassini approached within 52 km (32.3 miles) of the surface of Enceladus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Donkey
Pakistani men try to rescue a donkey buried during an earthquake in Ziarat, about 130 kilometers (81 miles) south of Quetta, Pakistan on October 30th, 2008. Rescue workers searched through the rubble of villages destroyed by a powerful earthquake in southwestern Pakistan that killed at least 215 people. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti/FILE)

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NFL football in 3D… Coming Soon

Football 3dWith sports fans still getting used to their high-definition television sets, the National Football League is already thinking ahead to the next potential upgrade: 3-D.

Next week, a game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders will be broadcast live in 3-D to theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Boston. It is a preliminary step on what is likely a long road to any regular 3-D broadcasts of football games.

The idea is a “proof of concept,” says Howard Katz, NFL senior vice president of broadcasting and media operations. “We want to demonstrate this and let people get excited about it and see what the future holds.”

The several hundred guests at the three participating theaters Dec. 4 will include representatives from the NFL’s broadcasting partners and from consumer-electronics companies. The event will be closed to the general public. Burbank, Calif.-based 3ality Digital LLC will shoot the game with special cameras and transmit it to a satellite. Thomson SA’s Technicolor Digital Cinema is providing the satellite services and digital downlink to each theater, and Real D 3D Inc. will power the display in the theaters.

This isn’t the first time the NFL has participated in a 3-D experiment. In 2004, a predecessor company to 3ality filmed the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers. When Sandy Climan, 3ality’s chief executive officer, shows the footage, “people crouch down to catch the ball,” he says. “It’s as if the ball is coming into your arms.”

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