While browsing NASA.gov today I ran across this awesome post from April 21st talking about NASA’s new Solar Dynamics Observatory, a telescope that is being used to study the Sun. They already have some amazing images up, but this one in particular caught my eye. It occurred to me that it would probably look pretty friggin cool mirrored. As I am not at home, I don’t have Photoshop readily available, so I set out to try to make it in GIMP. I immediately remembered why I never use that program, I hate the way it controls. Perhaps its just a matter of getting used to it, but I just felt so frustrated. After some trial and error, I finally finessed it into doing my bidding. I started out mirroring the image horizontally:
Then I went ahead and mirrored that vertically. Unfortunately there is a thing black line on the top of the image so I had to do a little smudging, but it looks alright:
I also messed with the brightness and contrast a bit, just to make it a bit more dramatic. Anyways, if you want the full image (it makes an awesome background), grab it here (1680×1679). If there is any interest, I can make it a wallpaper friendly image 🙂
