Often the most popular posts on the site, the galleries not only take our readers around the world, but back in time as well. Some galleries even show us the farthest reaching points of the Cosmos and the thriving microscopic world invisible to the human eye.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. (White House Flickr stream)

It’s almost impossible to grasp the scale of the tsunami that slammed into Japan yesterday following the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast near Sendai. The quake was a global-scale event, shifting the axis of the entire earth by four inches.

These satellite photos may help you grasp just how much water moved from the ocean onto land. Comparing the image from after the quake above with an image shot February 26 below, you can see how the coastline got erased by the displaced water.

If you click on the photos, you can see the very high-resolution photos that NASA’s Terra Satellite captured.

 

From the beaches of Mexico to the wilds of Kurdistan, the places on this year’s list take you to the end of the world and back.

Don’t miss the accompanying slideshow.

A New Jersey guy named Michael Black did a much better job over the weekend tracking the snow as it piled up on his patio furniture. Check out this “20 hours in 40 seconds” time lapse photo sequence he put together.

Here’s a bunch of photos and the accompanying article. The sheer size of this thing is absolutely incredible.

”My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

- Clarence Budington Kelland

Amazing photo. MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log:

This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a fast-growing sunspot 1112, crackling with solar flares.

Alan Boyle says:You don’t want to see the sun when it’s angry. Or do you? Over the past few days the Internet has been buzzing about a monster mega-filament of magnetized material, stretching more than 300,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) across the sun’s solar hemisphere. In this color-coded, extreme ultraviolet image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, you can see the filament arcing around sunspot 1112 at lower right. To give you a sense of scale, that width is longer than the distance between Earth and the moon. If the filament unleashed a flare in just the wrong direction, it could have caused trouble for electric grids and communication links on Earth.

Fortunately, when the eruption finally came on Monday, it sent a solar flare off into deep space and away from Earth. You can watch the blast on the SpaceWeather.com website. This won’t be the last outburst: Astronomers expect solar activity to continue rising toward“Solar Max” in 2012 or 2013.

Before Benjamin was born, Jude and I decided we were going to travel as much as we could during the first year. There was no doubt about it: we were going to bring Ben to meet his Zimbabwean family. What we didn’t know was that my brother was going to marry the woman of his dreams in New York City just 90 days after Benjamin was born. We also weren’t sure that we’d find ourselves in the California desert, on the cobbled streets of Amsterdam, the beaches of Newport, or in our favorite city on the planet — Cape Town. What a year, indeed.

Thanks to this handy little website, I was able to quickly add up how far the three of us flew the past nine months. Since December 2009, Benjamin, Jude and I have traveled just over 33,000 miles. That’s 3 continents and a total of nearly 70 hours in the air. I can’t begin to guess how many more hours we spent in trains, buses, rental cars — pushing our stroller around carrying 50 pounds of gear. It’s easy to say we’d do it all over again if we had the chance, but it’s even easier saying that we’ve already done it and once is enough. We earned the memories and the photographs we made.

Here are a few tips if you plan on flying across the world with your baby.

1. Be patient and remember you’re having fun.
2. Break the flight up into 15 minute sections. It’s easier to digest 15 minutes at a time instead of thinking about how you’re going to survive the next 7 and a half hours. Also, avoid the Moving Map channel. That little plane and estimated arrival time will drive you insane.
3. If you can, try to book flights which depart around a usual nap. Wheels up = nap time.
4. Take more than you need. More everything. More food. More diapers. More wipes. More clothes. Yeah, it’s true: you’ll be the guy in the airport you always said you would never be, but weather and airline schedules don’t get along too well.
5. Find a dollar store and buy a handful of kitchen utensils, like spatulas and measuring cups, or a rubber ball and a slinky. It’s cheap entertainment and bringing out a new toy every hour makes the world turn.
6. Save yourself a lot of trouble and buy an umbrella stroller. We own the UPPA G-Luxe, and the thing is G. Check it plane side when you board, and pray it comes back with four wheels. Ours didn’t, so have a contingency plan when you arrive in Africa and the grounds crew says “I don’t think the other wheels are coming; you better go.”
7. If you have a nice flight crew, go stand in the galley after the meal is served and they’re not cleaning up. Have you ever seen how many knobs, buttons, lights, switches, cabinets, drawers, and sliding things there are in there? It’s a boy’s paradise. Just watch the coffee pot. That one is usually hot.
8. Do not let other people’s comments or dirty faces bother you. If needed, remind them they are ugly and they were a baby once, too.
9. If you’re crossing time zones, be prepared to be up all night when you arrive. Babies don’t like being on different time zones any more than adults do. And being up all night can be fun (if you can sleep all day).
10. Don’t read too much about flying with a baby before you actually do. You know, like this site that has 20 tips for how to survive a flight. Much like anything else, you just gotta do it.
11. Make lots of photographs. Memory cards are cheap.

36,000 feet

Cape Point, South Africa

Cape Point, South Africa

Table Mountain, Cape Town

The internet is the largest photo gallery in the world. Below are some of our favorite places to find inspiring travel imagery, the best photojournalism in the world, and a whole lot more…

Congratulations to Adriano Malori, Italian rider on Lampre, for finishing the 2010 Tour de France – an accomplishment that 27 of the starters this year failed to achieve. He rode a total of 2,263 miles in 3 weeks at an average speed of 23.4 mph – and half the time he was riding faster than that! His pace over the course, finishing as Lanterne Rouge, was a mere 1.1 mph slower than the Tour winner. (tdflr)

The Big Picture has some great photographs from this year’s tour in two parts.

Call it what you will, “the noughties”, “the two-thousands” or something else, the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009) is now over. Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs, it becomes clear that it was a dramatic, often brutal decade. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars were by far the most dominant theme. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was ending his final term in office, very few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq – all that and much more has changed in the intervening time. It’s really an impossible task to sum up ten years in a handful of photographs, but below is my best attempt at a look back at the last decade – feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments below. (50 photos total)

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Craig Mod:

The GF1 is a near perfect travel camera.

For 16 days I lived with it strapped to me as I climbed through the valleys of central Nepal up to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,200 meters.

I covered the camera in sweat. I hit it against rocks (unintentionally). The air was often dusty and this dust, by the end of the trip, had worked its way into every nook of the GF1. And yet it performed flawlessly. Never once did it stutter or complain or fail to take an image when I asked it to. And only rarely did it take the wrong image.

The compact combination of Panasonic’s GF1 body and the 20mm f1.7 Lumix pancake lens works with you as a traveler. It’s a light, sturdy, capable, exceptionally well conceived photography kit that demands to be taken on adventures.

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) says it expects to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by this weekend after more than a year of repairs. The 27 km (17 mi) particle accelerator was launched last year, but suffered a failure from a faulty electrical connection, damaging 53 of the smasher’s 9,300 superconducting magnets. Repairs are now completed, and the plan is to begin injecting protons into the LHC this weekend, on the path to search for particles such as predicted-yet-unobserved Higgs Boson. Collected below are some photographs of the repairs, and of the LHC and some of its experiments in various stages of construction. (30 photos total)

Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.

A striking triplex penthouse apartment in a clock tower overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor has gone on the market for $25 million. Photos.

Thx, Lex

Tomorrow Last Thursday, August 6th, marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy”. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy – an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons. (34 photos total)

• Remembering Apollo 11 at The Big Picture
• John Noble Wilford, who covered the Apollo 11 mission for The New York Times, narrates a look back at the historic journey.
• One Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar. The New York Times
• Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. (Re-link from January)
• Extreme profanity at it’s best: The Onion reports on the Moon landing.
• Apollo 11 40th anniversary at NASA.gov

The Boston Herald reported on the new site today:

Families crowded around black-and-white television sets in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong take man’s first steps on the moon.

Now, they’ll be able to watch the Apollo 11 mission recreated in real time on the Web, follow Twitter feeds of transmissions between Mission Control and the spacecraft, and even get an e-mail alert when the lunar module touches down. Those features are part of a new Web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum commemorating the moon mission and Kennedy’s push to land Americans there first.

“Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe,” said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. “We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing.”

The Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. Thursday, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule’s route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong’s walk — in real time, but 40 years later. Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers.