This is the essence of the picturesque: something that is more pleasing in a mediated representation. While photography was invented well after Gilpin’s essay was written, many of us have had similar experiences of a photo imbuing additional beauty that one might not have appreciated without the photograph. What is beautiful to the eye in the ephemeral stream of (mostly) unmediated experience may be different from what is beautiful in its mediated, documented form. Gilpin’s essay struggles to capture the aesthetic essence of “picturesque” but makes clear that distinction between beauty as it naturally exists as opposed to constructed beauty. In 1792, English artist and cleric William Gilpin wrote about the distinction between that which is beautiful when viewed in person versus that which is best captured by its representation: "the most essential point of difference between the beautiful, and the picturesque that particular quality, which makes objects chiefly pleasing in painting." Turner, often depicted central Italy and were admired for their beauty indeed, they were painted to be more beautiful than the landscapes themselves. Disarmingly charming, these paintings, by such artists as Claude Lorrain and J.M.W. On the walls of many wealthy 18th and 19th century European palaces were hung so-called picturesque landscape paintings. Instead of thinking of social media as a clear window into the selves and lives of its users, perhaps we should view the Web as being more like a painting. When digitally connected, we are increasingly scrolling beautiful. Other networks, like Instagram, can similarly hurt the teeth. Wandering on Pinterest can prompt a disorienting vertigo, a dizzying sugar high, with so much that is adorable and clean and sweet. The explosive popularity of Pinterest - a social network based around collecting and sharing “beautiful” images - seems to suggest just the opposite: Rather than reflecting the naked truth of ourselves, we also embrace something a bit more pristine. You can view all the public images from FTN as soon as they are taken on our recent observations page for FTN - complete with Virtual Sky plugin showing where in the sky the objects which were observed lie.It is easy to mistake what we do online as centrally about exposure and transparent exhibitionism. Why not explore our archive of observations. If you are not eligable for 2m time you can still enjoy the images (and raw data) from these telescopes. If you are lucky enough to be using time on our 2m telescopes (either through Hawaii outreach programme or Faulkes Telescope Project), you will get better quality images with the longer observations. Click on the images to view the large versions. The JPEG image files are scaled down to the same size, which makes the stars on FTN look much sharper. The public images appear much sharper on FTN compared to FTS but this is because the field of view is over twice the size Hawaiian and UK schools using FTS will have a 4.6 x 4.6 arcminute field of view but when using FTN will have 10.36 x 10.22 arcminutes (if you would like to know more about this have a look at our pages on How Telescopes Work). Here are some excellent examples of the capabilities of the newly enabled camera (it is called Spectral but it is actually an imaging camera not a spectrograph). I am pleased to say that it is working well and producing picturesque images. Fortunately FTN has a second camera which we were able to make available to education users at the end of March. We have been trying very hard to fix this camera but so far it is still causing problems. This was the main work-horse camera for this telescope and came as a blow to many scientists, and UK and Hawaii schools, who could not continue their programmes on FTN. At the end of February one of the cameras on Faulkes Telescope North broke down.
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