Photographer Puts 189 Non-Existant Spy Satellites on Show [Spy Sats]
“Yesterday up in the air I snapped a sat that wasn’t there,”— so might photographer Trevor Paglen say about his show at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum. It’s a series of photos of 189 secret satellites: the ones that officially “don’t exist.” Dubbed The Other Night Sky the photos are time-lapse images of the snoop-sats moving through the night sky, made with a custom star-tracker. Apparently it’s his attempt to draw similarities between government secrecy and Galileo’s historic tangles with the Catholic church. Found with the help of an amateur astronomer, each photo is of a named spy sat, and they’re quietly beautiful—if you can forget the eerie spying aspect. The show runs until September 14. [Wired] galleryPost(’paglensats’, 3, ”);
Stellar photography seems like a wonderous thing: you and a loved one on a starry night taking beautiful images of the heavens -- before making out. Unfortunately, anyone who has tried it knows it's more often a frustrating exercise of fiddling with exposure and aperture settings on your SLR while it hangs precariously off the side of your 
In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas in Austin is the world’s most powerful laser. Switched on for the first time last week, it has an output of a quadrillion watts—in terms of zeros, that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000. Wired has gotten its hands on some stunning pictures of the $7-million installation, and has a detailed explanation of how the thing works. The laser will be used to recreate astronomical goings-on, such as supernovae and, as the manager of the laser project says, “You’d have to go out into space and hang out with an exploding star to observe what we plan to observe here in Texas.” [