Discover the Miracle of Light: Flying through an Aurora

This beautiful timelapse from space was created from photographs taken from on board the International Space Station (ISS) by the Expedition 40 crew, end of August, 2014. They ISS crew flew right through a massive aurora after a solar mass ejection took place.

Natural Light Display
An aurora is a natural light display in the sky. It originally comes from the Latin word aurora, “sunrise” or the Roman goddess of dawn. The Aurora is especially visible in the high latitude, the Arctic and Antarctic regions. It is caused by the collision of solar wind and magnetospheric charged particles with the high altitude atmosphere: the thermosphere.

Auroral Zone
Most auroras occur in a band known as the ‘auroral zone’, which is typically 3° to 6° wide in latitude. Most often, it is vividly around the spring and autumn equinoxes. The charged particles and solar wind are directed into the atmosphere by the Earth’s magnetosphere. A geomagnetic storm expands the auroral zone to lower latitudes.

Another Time Lapse Sequence
Here’s another great time lapse sequence of photographs taken by another crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who – as far as I know – shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.

An earlier edit from 2011 by Michael König

Just another great glimpse of Lighting-Inspiration and to celebrate the International Year of Light (IYL2015). Thanks for noticing this unusual but impressive blogpost. Hope you like it as much as I do!

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How LED lighting optics and graphics seamlessly combine

Last time I wrote you, I promised to come up with some attractive results of both functional- and decorative optical designs, as well as some first design impressions of the new 3D printed optics website. Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any decorative design patterns or applications yet. Nevertheless, I expect that the displayed, functional LED lighting optics below will impress you that much, that you will forgive me for now…

Printed LED optics: Fresnel lenses – micro optics – combined grapics

Right, they’re printed! All of them. LUXeXceL’s revolutionary 3D printing process will offer great value to the global LED lighting market. From now on, OEM lighting manufacturers and designers of LED lighting optics will generate significant cost reductions and time savings on the additive manufacturing of their LED lighting optics!

We’ll catch this and more of these revolutionary LED lighting optics in the next upcoming website. I am happy to share you the first design results of the homepage. It needs to be improved slightly, but I guess we’re almost there.

Printed LED Optics – Functional Lighting_Homepage

We allow users to switch easily from a ‘functional lighting’ (blue, technical) onto a ‘decorative lighting’ (orange, design full) environment on the right hand top. This is where technical and architectural lighting meets each other. Designs now can go ‘hand-in-hand’ with lens functionality, since it’s possible to foresee a functional LED lighting optic with any graphic elements, structure, typography, etc. The opposite is also true: decorative design lighting can now contain also functional optical structures and elements, e.g. integrated magnifiers.

Decorative, right. That’s exactly what you missed out in this post. But I promise you to come up with that information in one of my next posts.

Good design is obvious, great design is translucent

It’s less than a month ago since I wrote about the upcoming launch of the Luximpress website. Cool stuff to work with for graphimedia and digital artists, working with SFX and light, or different. Here’s another innovation coming up, based on the same “Printoptical Technology” of LUXeXceL: 3d printed optics for the lighting industry.

The future outlook for this application is great, since it offers great flexibility in terms of design and supply chain simplification. Moreover, it is possible to combine both functional structures and elements with any graphic textures, typograhy, etc. to be printed in one single 3D printing process, the so called “Optographics”. As a result of this, the company will not only provide functional LED lighting optics, but also decorative, high-impact lamp shades & shields.

A comprehensive website will be launched on short term, to foresee in the international market demand for LED lighting optics and provide LUXeXceL’s users a central platform to work from and foresee in their information demand.

Next time I write you, I will show some expressive results of both functional optics and decorative optical design patterns. That time, maybe some first design impressions of the website will be available.

Some ‘high lights’ to impress

Last time I wrote I promised to come back to you with further Printoptical Technology examples for the Graphic Industry. Here are some.

Transparent 3D relief print – Integrated Optical Magnifier – 3D stained glass replica

Printoptical Technology adds value to graphic products and provide designers with new graphic design opportunities. Personally, I am convinced that it will be one of the crucial ‘tools’ that will help the industry to mutate from a commodity industry into an added value industry in the near future. This is a real “must-have” for trendsetting interior designers, 3D printing enthusiasts, lighting designers, digital 3D artists.

Bringing those innovative printing solutions to market, Luximpress will contribute significantly to the future of the printing industry and service to facilitate customer differentiation and development. The shift to a new technology is not anymore determined by volumes and capacity expansion, but more and more by flexibility and differentiation. This is where it shines out! Moreover, the coming of this brand new technology will enforce the printing industry position in an evolving value chain, which includes this kind of ‘new media’ in particular.

The possibilities are various, the designers’ creativity is the only limitation…!