USA Literary Map by Geoff Sawers and Bridget Hannigan

Map of Literary Britain and Northern Ireland by Geoff Sawers

This one is fantastic: Designer Geoff Sawers created a hand-lettered, literary map of the United States and Britain by featuring authors according to their approximate locations. Via Neatorama.

You’ve seen time-lapse videos of the night sky here before, but this one is particularly beautiful and awe-inspiring – take the time to watch it in full-screen mode.

Randy Halverson shot the scenes in South Dakota, Utah, Colorado, and Wisconsin.  You have to get way out beyond the light pollution to see the stars this way!  The music was specially composed for the project by Bear McCreary, you can learn more about the video at Halverson’s website.

Here’s a wonderful winter art by Simon Beck, who walked the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, on snowshoes to create crop-circle inspired snow art.

Check out Simon’s Facebook page for more, via Neatorama

I love book stores, but these aren’t your local Waterstones.  Flavorwire has the gallery of 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world. (The one above is the El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Take a look, before Amazon puts them all out of business!

NASA has released a high-definition image of the Earth it calls Blue Marble 2012.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

The original Blue Marble image was taken in 1972 by astronauts aboard Apollo 17. Until today, it was my desktop image. NASA has made the new image available for download in several sizes. Link to story. Link to image.