This gorgeous thing was designed by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz and they say that it's the "the largest wearable display in the world." I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that I wanted to cry when I read that the dress went straight from the sewing room to the museum mannequin, without ever being worn by a real woman. [Wired]

Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website.

"This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, "the real work started," Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model-and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

"Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background," Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

[University of Chicago via Axel Mellinger via Examiner via io9]

Those multimedia features include music, photos, videos, the Web, YouTube, and Amazon MP3 for music downloads. The phone's other key specs include 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, microSD card expandable memory (up to 16GB), and support for Google services and Exchange ActiveSync.

With a completely new OS compared to the original Behold (and even the upgraded Memoir), it's kind of strange that Samsung kept the Behold name. Especially when it resembles the Android powered Samsung Galaxy. Still, there you have it. T-Mobile hasn't gone into pricing, but did say the Behold II would arrive "before the start of the holidays."

Samsung's Galaxy is a 11.9 millimeter-slim handset that features a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen and 5-megapixel camera, and also comes equipped with GPS, Wi-Fi and and WCDMA support. Even more, the phone calls attention to the haptic feedback on its virtual keyboard, which is a first for a major touchscreen smartphone.

Because the AMOLED screen reportedly draws less power than the iPhone's TFT-LCD screens do, the Galaxy apparently has a longer battery life, making this—coupled with the haptic feedback—more mainstream-consumer friendly for those who have yet to purchase a smartphone. Although pricing and release dates are not finalized, the Galaxy will supposedly be available in Europe by the end of this month, and the rest of the world in the second half of 2009. [PC World via Talk Android]

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Some specifics: The Canon was equipped with a fisheye lens (an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens) and powered with an external battery to capture all that goodness. The more interesting part is the replacement anti-alias filter the photographer, William Castleman, used: The Canon's stock AA filter blocks out certain red wavelengths to achieve a "more desirable" skin tone, but if it's replaced with a filter that lets those wavelengths in, you've got yourself a camera capable of shooting a galaxy, as seen here, even if we can't see it with the naked eye. Really, really cool stuff. [Vimeo via Crunchgear]

Instead of amino acids—the building blocks of life—they found ethyl formate, which is the molecule responsible for the taste of raspberries. One of the astronomers responsible for the finding at the IRAM electromagnetic radiation telescope in Spain, Arnaud Belloche, said that while ethyl formate "does happen to give raspberries their flavour, there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries."

Yes, Arnaud, but I want to lick that ice-cold milkshake anyway. [Daily Telegraph—Thanks Genevieve!]

Click on the image for high definition version

In fact, I've spent most of my day looking up planets that I never heard of. [Trukstop via Wookieepedia via Dark Roasted Blend]

This is what the Hubble Telescope saw, conveniently labeled by our friends at NASA. Where is the planet, you ask? Do you see that little underlined part to the right? That's the unimaginatively named Fomalhaut b! To get the image, Hubble's camera needed to block out the brightest part of the star, which shines millions of times brighter than the planet itself.

And here's the picture taken by the Gemini and Keck observatories of the bodies orbiting Star HR8799. HR8799 is about 1.5 times more massive than our sun, and five times more luminous. Like the Hubble's image, this star needed to have its light blocked too in order for us to see the planets. These two, despite being an even greater distance away, were slightly easier to find since they're young. Being only about 60 million years old, they're still glowing from leftover heat from their formation, making them brighter than Fomalhaut B, which only glows when reflecting light from Fomalhaut.

Here's an artistic rendering of Star HR8799 and it's planets. The third planet hasn't been imaged yet, but thanks to mathematical calculations, we know it's there!

So in case you were doubting it—yes, other star systems exist. And as our galactical camera technology gets better, the pictures will start looking more like actual planets, rather than fetal specks on a giant Eye of Sauron. [Bad Astronomy]

Image credits: NASA and the Gemini Observatory

A Cosmic Eye is a unique configuration of galaxies in the sky, with one galaxy in the foreground and the other in the background, giving it the appearance of an eye in space. The foreground galaxy— in this case the yellow one, 2.2 billion light years from Earth—acts as the lenses thanks to its gravitational field, which bends the light coming from the background galaxy—in blue, 11 billion light years from Earth. This distortion effect, which was predicted by Einstein theories, has enlarged the early spiral galaxy by eight times.

The technique gives an idea of what would be possible with the next generation of telescopes—the European Extremely Large Telescope and the American Thirty Metre Telescope. [Physorg]

Credit: Cosmic Eye showing the foreground galaxy in yellow at the centre of the image surrounded by the blue arc of the distant galaxy. Credit: Mark Swinbank/Durham University