In addition to doing some of our favorite book covers, Martiniere has done concept art for some huge science-fiction movies in the past decade — including Knowing. His images of the alien spaceship, and its alien passengers who abduct Cage's son at the end of the movie, are just as radical and cool-looking as you'd expect from his cover art. We especially love his radical reimagining of an alien spaceship, with the golden wheels and weird symmetries. Here are a few more of the images we loved — there's way more at the link, including his concept art for Mortal Kombat Vs. DC. [Stephan Martiniere]

An earlier version of this panoramic image was an Astronomy Picture Of The Day in 2001, but the Panorama 2.0 is much, much more detailed, and Mellinger has eliminated some distortions and other problems in the original image.

According to a press release from the University of Chicago Press:

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]

We were ecstatic to interview Doug Jones at the Wrath of Con party over Comic Con and we've been holding on to this gem, so we could show you his creepy footage from the Legion clips alongside it. The whole interview is transcribed below, as it gets a little difficult to hear in some places.

I'm one of [the bad guys]. I basically have a [few] showcase cameos in the film. My character plays in about the third part of the film. And that's when things break loose, or when Heaven breaks loose rather. That said, I think theologically, it's a big mind-bend. It's a good conversation starter for topics on religion, it really is. Because humanity is in a place where we might deserve another flood, like what happened in the Old Testament. That's the question he's posing with this script. And it's really well written, it's a beautiful movie.

Tell us about Paul [Bettany] as the angel. Why does he need a gun and a knife?

Paul Bettany's character, as you saw in the footage, he cuts his wings off. He's actually going away from the orders he was given when he comes to Earth. I don't want to give too much away, but he's kind of a rebellious angel. And with the rebel comes a knife and a gun.

How violent does this movie get?

Pretty darn. Pretty darn violent, but in such a creative way that it's not like blood-on-the-wall horror film at all. It's apocalyptic, it's epic, it's going to make you shudder, possibly yell an scream. I think; that's how I would feel.

What freaked you out?

Well, the angel that inhabits a human being, that makes an entrance before me, is a woman. It's an old woman in a diner, another cameo in the film. But it is something that will absolutely freak your pants off.

Then we asked him about being in a movie where he wasn't covered in make up like in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy or Pan's Labyrinth and he has a pretty sweet response to that along with seeing his face on a t-shirt.

Here are a slew of new Legion stills released from Sony. We can't wait for the spiritual cleansing!

Additional reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz

Last Thursday, Tron Legacy director Joe Kosinski showed concept art from the new film at Comic Con's Disney 3D panel. Kosinski and his team have retained some of the characteristics of the original Tron, such as the solid blocks blocks in the scenery and the lines of blue light, but have used improved technology to lend the computer world some of the texture of the real world.

Among the vehicles showcased are an updated Recognizer, the ship the Master Control Program uses to capture programs, a Solar Sailer, a freight train that travels along a beam of light, a Light Runner, which is like a Light Cycle except that it can hold two passengers and travel off the Game Grid under its own power, a Light Cycle, a bike that travels along the grid, and the white Second Generation Light Cycle, designed by Flynn himself and faster than an ordinary Light Cycle.

Kosinski indicated that we would see the gladiatorial games on a larger scale in the sequel, and that they have evolved into a multi-round disc game tournament held in a giant stadium. Professional athletes were hired to provide motion-capture footage of players jumping, flipping, and catching the discs. In addition to the larger disc game stadium, Kosinski showed images of another place we haven't seen before: Tron City, a virtual metropolis where programs live and work. Kosinski told the audience that he hopes to capture what it's like for the programs to not only operate but actually live inside this city.

Images via Signalnoise

Yes, the musical version of Disney's The Lion King is coming back to San Diego, and we keep seeing this poster everywhere:

Compare with the Avatar banners, which are also all over town:

Are we completely delusional to be seeing a similarity here? Maybe it's the sequins on the face, the shiny face paint, or the lion eyes and nose, but there's just something there. Obviously it's time for someone to write some Simba/Neytiri crossover fanfic. But actually, Meredith pointed out there's someone else the Avatar aliens totally remind us of:

That's right, the cat nurses from Doctor Who's "New Earth" episode. How did we not see it before?

The images, which appeared in New Scientist, were taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Zooming in on Mars in glorious 3D [New Scientist]

Yesterday, the Hubble Telescope warned us of impending doom from Sauron's Eye, but it's hardly the only astronomical body making us nervous. There's the Cat's Eye Nebula, staring at us with its unblinking gaze, the arachnophobia-inducing Tarantula and Red Spider Nebula, the Ghost of Jupiter (our gas giant's spectral doppelganger), and the eerie apparitions contained in the Ghost Head and Little Ghost Nebulae.

[NASA Images]

This one comes from photographer John Nassr in Baguio, Philippines.

Every evil laboratory should have jaggedy pipes full of blood. But here you can see that the final sets had black pipes that hide the gore inside. Still, it looks pretty cool. Production designer Sung Pong Choo and art director Joel Chong have only worked on Chinese films apart from Ultraviolet.

and that the monster definitely isn't Godzilla. We also know there will be a lot of hand held shakycam footage in an effort to seem real and gritty. But you've gotta show a little more skin on that creature in the shadows if you want movie-goers to take notice.

Now if only Abrams could maintain the same veil of secrecy around Star Trek. We really don't need to know every time an additional background character is cast.

Cloverfield image gallery

12 New Cloverfield Photos [/Film]

Other images show potential landing sites for a Mars Science Lab, alongside chasms that may have formed due to runoff from a lake. The color is enhanced beyond what the naked human eye could see. But it definitely makes you hope we get to put a science station on that part of Mars in our lifetimes.

New Images For 10 October 2007 [HiRISE]