Images

With a flourish of new images - from exploding stars to colliding galaxies and a new impact scar on Jupiter - NASA officials finally pulled the wraps off the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, almost four months after astronauts completed a final round of repairs and upgrades. "Hubble is back in action," said Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.. "You're only getting the tiniest taste of what astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over the many years it's going to last."

A physician from Arbutus was ordered yesterday to spend a year and a day in federal prison after he was found with pornographic images of children. Michael Sapko, 31, pleaded guilty in November to possession of child pornography. He could have received up to 30 months in prison from U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake. According to the plea agreement, an undercover Greensburg, Pa., police officer posed online as a 30-year-old female and contacted Sapko in May 2004. In online conversations, Sapko discussed how he had accumulated a personal collection of child pornography from the Internet, prosecutors said.

It's been a couple of weeks now since Google Maps' new Street View feature launched, and the mix of enthusiasm and criticism has been constant ever since. Google's latest feature offers people street-level images of the streets and avenues of several American cities. The impressive result allows computer users to travel through neighborhoods and see much of what a person actually in those cities would see. The project is a stunning act of ingenuity and effort on the part of the innovative search giant, which spent more than a year compiling the still images from digital cameras attached to the top of cars and vans.

Someone in Australia browsing an Internet chat site in November spotted a disturbing image: a live video showing a man molesting a child who was sitting in his lap. The unidentified Web user quickly notified the chat site, which called the Australian Federal Police, who, using computer addresses, traced related images on the site to a man halfway around the world on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The international investigation culminated yesterday in a federal courtroom in Baltimore where Roderick Gene Parks, 42, was sentenced to 30 years in prison without possibility of parole.

A 62-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced yesterday in federal court to more than four years in prison for possessing more than 600 images of child pornography. In addition to a 51-month prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis also ordered that Alfred O'Neill register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. According to the statement of facts presented to the court as part of the plea agreement, the Maryland State Police received a complaint in November 2004 from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about a suspicious person in Maryland using an Internet screen name.

President Clinton put the relationship between media violence and real-life acts of carnage like the one at Columbine High School on the front burner yesterday when he urged the nation's parents, teachers and pupils to consider whether graphic violence on television and the Internet plays a role in such tragedies."

In the last three decades, photography's hold over the minds and hearts of millions of people increasingly has become an important subject for artists who don't necessarily think of themselves as photographers.The changing meaning of photography at the end of the millennium is a fascinating subtext of tonight's PBS broadcast, "American Photography: A Century of Images," which examines the tremendous impact photography has had on life in the 20th century.Photography can inform, educate, inspire and entertain because it is good at persuading us of the truthfulness of what is presented.

If you use e-mail to keep in touch with family and friends, it's time you took advantage of the new medium to liven up your messages with photos.It's one thing to tell Grandma that your daughter just lost her first tooth -- but it's a lot more fun to send a photo showing that gap-toothed grin.If you have a scanner or digital camera, sending a photo as an e-mail attachment is a snap. And if you don't have either, most photofinishers will be happy to put your images on a disk for a few dollars extra when you get your film developed.

Few works of art sum up the spirit of an age as vividly as Pieter Breugel the Elder's "Temperance." For there the 16th-century Flemish artist, whose extraordinary images were etched and engraved by so many of the leading printmakers of his day, expresses with quintessential clarity Renaissance Europe's love affair with measurement.With startling immediacy, Breugel's cartographers measure lunar angles, his merchants and accountants count money, and his musicians perform the latest music so neatly divided into -- what else?

The images are great, and the stories behind them are often incredible. Too bad the people responsible for "Moment of Impact" don't do them justice.Airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT, "Moment of Impact" promises to tell the stories behind six Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, all extraordinary images that speak quite eloquently all by themselves.The featured images include Robert H. Jackson's unforgettable shot of Lee Harvey Oswald grimacing in pain as a bullet from Jack Ruby's gun rips into him, Slava Veder's exuberant shot of a POW being welcomed home by his family and Stanley J. Forman's tragic depiction of death on a Boston fire escape.

One image appears uncannily like a butterfly, its ethereal wings extending into the blackness of space. But looks are deceiving, and the apparently tranquil scene actually depicts a violent nebula of superheated gas charging across the Milky Way Galaxy at 600,000 miles per hour, with a dying star once five times the mass of the sun at its center. In another picture, a cluster of several swirls of light seem to interact in a celestial dance, while a smaller, glowing circle hovers at some distance from the others.

With a flourish of new images - from exploding stars to colliding galaxies and a new impact scar on Jupiter - NASA officials finally pulled the wraps off the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, almost four months after astronauts completed a final round of repairs and upgrades. "Hubble is back in action," said Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.. "You're only getting the tiniest taste of what astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over the many years it's going to last."

On a summer afternoon in 1950, Life magazine photographer Edward Clark spent some time outdoors with a then-unknown starlet, snapping dozens of pictures of 24-year-old Marilyn Monroe as she walked along a tree-lined path, lounged on a park bench reading a book, posed alongside a stream and peered wistfully over the rail of a bridge. Few, if any, of those photographs have ever been seen by the public. Until now. Under contract to Life and Google, a Frederick-based imaging company has spent two years scanning those rare images, along with a few million others from the magazine archives.

A 21-year-old Crofton man pleaded guilty yesterday to possessing more than 600 images of child pornography on his home computer, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Prosecutors said that James Spencer Godboldte was arrested after an undercover law enforcement officer in Tampa, Fla., downloaded two images of child pornography from a computer address that belonged to the suspect June 30, 2006. Federal agents searched Godboldte's house in Anne Arundel County on Sept. 8, 2006, and said they found hundreds of images of children between 7 and 14 years old stored on his computer.

A 23-year-old Frederick County man pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court in Baltimore to having about 1,300 images of child pornography on his computer, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Gregory Lynn Lively of Point of Rocks also traded child pornography on the Internet. Lively owned images of prepubescent children, along with sadistic and masochistic images of children. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison. According to the guilty plea, Lively ordered a video of child pornography from an undercover Web site.

It's been decades since French film critic Alfred Bazin first noted the peculiar power of photography to compel belief in the truthfulness of images - even if those "truths" exist only in our minds. The motion-picture camera, little more than 100 years old, introduced something completely new to the ancient art of image-making: a photographic likeness so compelling that it convinces us the flickering forms on the screen in a darkened room are as real as the person sitting next to us. Exhibit The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, through May 11. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and Seventh Street Southwest, Washington.

After seeing Violence and Tranquility, Tony Shore's unexpectedly dark vision of his hometown at C. Grimaldis Gallery, I couldn't help thinking the prize-winning Baltimore painter has been watching The Wire, HBO's award-winning dark drama about crime and corruption in Baltimore. The Wire is classic American film noir for the small screen. Shore's unsparing images of gang warfare and violent crime bring the same moral ambivalence, alienation and gratuitous cruelty to the gallery scene. There's something shocking about this subject matter, though perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Shore has begun using such imagery recently.

In a news media landscape where more and more citizen journalists are wielding cell phone cameras, it was a series of old-school, still photographs taken by a seasoned professional that held the world's attention in the immediate aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. From the Web site of NPR, to the screens of CNN and cnn.com, images captured by John Moore, a Pulitzer-winning photographer working for Getty Images, served as a powerful reminder that journalistic training, technical skill and professional know-how still matter when it comes to recording major breaking world events.

It was a historic moment, but the picture on the front page of Wednesday's Sun showing President Bush smiling as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shake hands during the Mideast summit at the Naval Academy in Annapolis was probably only minutes from not existing, at least in my camera. The Sun was awarded a pass for me to be among a handful of photographers allowed into Memorial Hall to cover the historic event. But to pick it up I needed to get from the Navy football stadium, where I received my basic credentials to the Navy basketball arena, by 8:45 a.m. A major early morning traffic accident, layers of Secret Service checkpoints and bomb-sniffing dogs slowed my progress.

When I wrote a short primer on HDTV a couple of weeks ago, the response convinced me that this is a great time to review the technologies that are most likely to find themselves gift-wrapped this year. Although digital cameras have been around for a decade now - and many buyers are on their second or third - I still get lots of questions about them. So here's the 2007 holiday version of Digital Cameras in a Nutshell: Instead of using film, digital cameras record images on a grid of light-sensitive dots, usually a charge-coupled device, or CCD. Once it records an image, the camera stores it on a flash memory card.