Sometimes with a particularly confusing image, you need a backstory to sort out what's going on in the pic and/or why it's happening. Pictures are great at illustrating, but they tend not to tell entire stories all by themselves.
Not so much with these pics. They do a good chunk of the explaining and get an idea across without much in the way of outside help needed.
They don't really make pants in David's size. If you expected Michelangelo's masterpiece of manliness to be man-sized, this image ought to straighten that idea out. The statue is, in fact, 17 feet tall.
There may be a bit of perspective in play in this image, but not that much. We're still talking about a 20-plus-foot shark here. Jaws didn't pick its monster at random - this is the sort of real-life eating machine they had in mind.
You really don't want to let bees get this cozy in your house. This person's attic bore 35 pounds of honey, which they said meant an estimated population of about 60,000 bees.
A colossal squid is not the sort of animal to apologize for its actions, and you can see why right here. That's a colossal squid's beak, as big as a grown man's hand. Combined with what must be some massive tentacles, a colossal squid is definitely not to be messed with.
Boeing's factory in Everett is the largest building in the world by volume, and you can see why it has to be, assembling some of the biggest aircraft around. The entire Boeing Everett campus is just huge - according to Boeing, it's "big enough to encompass Disneyland with 12 acres left over for parking."
This look inside the original invisibility cloak from the Harry Potter series shows how they accomplished the effects - just like with weather broadcasts, it's old school green screen technology, with the green sewn inside the cloak.
For Jurassic Park, the movie makers didn't rely completely on CGI, but rather used practical effects, like this special effects artist who's acting as a dinosaur's legs. Maybe that's why the movie holds up so well.
If it ever seems like it's just raining on you and nowhere else, well, there's a reason for that. As seen from an airplane, this rainshower is surprisingly localized, not spread across the kind of acreage you might expect.
Over the centuries, Niagara Falls has been on the move, receding its way further and further upstream. So, the falls you see today are just snapshot. Eroding at a rate of about one foot per year, they'll look very different in the future.
In the early days of the space program, to study the effects of motion sickness, NASA's scientists recruited deaf people like John Zakutney. All of the deaf people in the program had lost their hearing in a way that damaged their vestibular systems in their inner ears, making them immune to motion sickness.
If you've ever felt like a day was weirdly shady compared to the clouds in the sky, there might be a good reason for that. Those huge anvil clouds that accompany thunderstorms stretch so high into the atmosphere that they cast shadows well beyond what you'd think they would.
Or at least the lens. This is the same guy's face, taken with different lenses and focal lengths. It's crazy to see how much difference they can make - the far left and middle photos could almost be two separate people.
You can learn a lot from an Antarctic ice core sample. For example, this core contains a noticeable ring toward the bottom. That ring was caused by ash from a volcanic eruption that occurred about 21,000 years ago.
Well, looking down on the center of the Pacific from space shows almost no land whatsoever. Only the edges of any continents can be seen. Really puts the "big blue" in perspective, doesn't it?
If it looks like this area has a lot of ship-shaped islands, it's because a lot of ships were sunk here. A lot. Mallows Bay in Maryland is considered the "largest shipwreck fleet in the Western Hemisphere." Hundreds of ships have been scuttled here and nature has reclaimed them as reefs.
The anti-glare coating on museum glass is something else, and it makes a lot of sense to have it. You wouldn't want it on, say, a glass door, where someone could easily just walk right into it. But in a museum setting, yeah, it's great to be able to see a display clearly.
Or perhaps, a dance of one? This is what you get when you take a long exposure shot and add an LED light to see the paths a Roomba takes while cleaning a room. There are some wild algorithms at work there.
For example, what it looks like when a plane takes off. They have to get to altitude fairly quickly, and it looks much different here than it feels when you're on board, doesn't it?
In the early days of the technology, all photographs were long exposures. When people got their portraits taken, as President Ulysses S. Grant is doing here, they couldn't move around much or it would cause the picture to blur badly. So, they were provided special stands to lean on to maintain their posture while the picture was being taken.
The tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu is actually composed of nine islands, but the only airport is this one. It takes up so much land that it doubles as sporting fields and social center when it's not in use.
