For their app Earth As Art, NASA has taken an unusual foray into the realm of “art for art sake”. Although in this case it would probably be more accurately described as satellite imagery for art sake.

The app is primarily a collection of the most visually striking images returned by the Landsat 7 satellite with information about each image available with just a tap. Though these same images can also be found in galleries of the same name on the U.S. Geological Survey site, I highly recommend downloading this free app for its intuitive design and coffee-table book experience.

These are just a few of the new images we’ve added to our app Cassini HD for iPad in our new update available today. 

Sol Explorer for iPhone and iPad by Reason Interactive is a super cool app that lets you zip around the solar system in your own spaceship and learn about the planets and their moons in a fun and interactive way. It’s got impressive graphics and a neat video demonstrating the scale of the planets. It’s exactly the kind of interactive eye candy that makes apps so much fun.

Brian of Reason Interactive happens to be a friend of mine and sometimes friendship  comes with perks. In this case, he’s offering it for half price ($0.99) for today (Sunday, Oct. 21) only. 

NASA launched the Cassini orbiter on October 15, 1997, to explore Saturn, its rings, and system of moons. Fifteen years later, it’s still thrilling the world with wonderfully impossible images from a billion miles away. Thinx is honoring this anniversary by offering its Cassini HD iPad app for half price, just $0.99. Featuring more than 840 stunning images, Cassini HD is the perfect way to see the greatest highlights of this amazing mission.

jtotheizzoe:

Cassini HD - Explore Saturn Via iPad

Our very own science/art Tumblrer staceythinx has been hard at work designing the Cassini HD iPad app, available Sept. 15 in the iTunes store (that’s tomorrow!). It will be free for the first day, by the way (I’ll add the link when it goes live).

I’ve had a chance to play with the app, and it’s really something special. NASA’s Cassini mission has provided us with what I think is the greatest catalogue of planetary images from our solar system. Saturn is such a visually striking celestial body, and exploring its moons and rings via photography gives us the ability to take a digital rocket tour with just a single click.

The Cassini HD app delivers more than just pretty pictures, of course. Tap an image to find out the science behind each photo, and any of them can be shared on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, etc. right in the app. The philosophy behind this project, and Stacey’s Tumblr, is making knowledge beautiful. Mission accomplished!

I give it a rating of 10 rings out of 10. Go get it tomorrow!

I’m absolutely delighted that jtotheizzoe of It’s Okay To Be Smart likes our app! I really hope you will too. You can try it for free today and please let us know what you think!

Today is the day: Cassini HD, our first app for iPad, is finally available in the App Store! Be sure and get it today at the special price of FREE (regularly $1.99). Most important of all, be sure and leave feedback on iTunes — we want to hear what you think. Happy discovering!

To celebrate the upcoming release of our new Cassini HD iPad app, I will be posting my favorite images from it all week. These natural color images capture Saturn in all its soft-toned splendor.

Cassini HD will be released in the iTunes store on Saturday, Sept. 15. Take advantage of our special release offer and get it for free that first day only. 

To celebrate the upcoming release of our new Cassini HD iPad app, I will be posting my favorite images from it all week. These natural and false color images are among my favorites because they capture Titan’s unusual atmosphere so spectacularly. 

Cassini HD will be released in the iTunes store on Saturday, Sept. 15. Take advantage of our special release offer and get it for free that first day only. 

To celebrate the upcoming release of our new Cassini HD iPad app, I will be posting my favorite images from it all week. These natural color images capture Saturn’s rings with such graphic beauty and stark drama, they’re easily among my favorites.

Cassini HD will be released in the iTunes store on Saturday, Sept. 15. Take advantage of our special release offer and get it for free that first day only. 

I’m very excited to announce that we have a release date for our new app Cassini HD. It will be available in the iTunes App Store this Saturday (Sept. 15) and it will be totally FREE for the whole first day (after Saturday it will be the regular price of $1.99). 

About the app:

While handheld and mobile devices have the power to put information at our fingertips, they can also transform how we learn and interact with knowledge. Cassini HD, the first iPad app from Thinx, harnesses that power to take audiences on a voyage of discovery to the ringed planet of Saturn. The app’s intuitive design helps users to easily navigate a collection of more than 840 spectacular images returned to Earth by the Cassini orbiter while showcasing those images in a way that is both elegant and informative.

Features:

• Journey from Saturn itself, to its stunning rings and past more than 20 different moons 
• Supports both portrait and landscape orientation for optimal viewing quality. 
• Full captions expand with additional information with just a tap 
• Alphabetical menu brings you directly to any section of interest; unique navigation map allows you to scroll easily through this vast collection 
• Integration with the most popular social networks: Share your discoveries with friends on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, or via email 
• Save your favorite images to your photo roll and use them as a wallpaper on your iPad 
• Future updates will add to this collection the latest images from Cassini as more become available.

This week is my blogiversary. August 23 of last year I put up my first posts on Tumblr not knowing what to expect. Fast forward to one year later, and I’ve met lots of new people who have made this a fun and interesting place to share and exchange all kinds of interesting art and ideas.

It’s such a great community that I wanted to give something back as a sort of anniversary gift, so I tried to come up with something appropriate. After seeing yet another spectacular photo from Cassini travel across my dashboard while thinking “I wish I could put them all in one giant gallery”, I realized that I had my plan. 

With my husband Joe, my app design partner, we got to work on what was going to be a simple ebook of the NASA Cassini Mission’s best photos. As time went on, I found the images so inspiring that the project grew, and it became a full fledged app with over 840 images, interactive menus, expandable captions and, best of all, the ability to share the images on Tumblr (and other popular sites) through a social media sharing tool.

I wanted to announce that it was available for download on my anniversary, but instead all I can do is let you know its coming VERY soon and there will be an opportunity for you to get it for free. So stay tuned and thanks for an awesome year!

You can find out more about it here. You can also join our mailing list for future announcements.

The British Imperial War Museum has culled from its collection of over 20,000 wartime posters their favorite 30 from World War II and released them in the form of a free app. Each one has details about its designer as well as the stories behind the designs and comments from IWM’s curators. You can also buy prints of the posters, including everybody’s favorite:

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist is a new exhibit at The Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace that is on display through October 7, 2012. 

About the exhibit:

This exhibition is the largest ever of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the human body. Leonardo has long been recognised as one of the great artists of the Renaissance, but he was also a pioneer in the understanding of human anatomy. He intended to publish his ground-breaking work in a treatise on anatomy, and had he done so his discoveries would have transformed European knowledge of the subject. But on Leonardo’s death in 1519 the drawings remained a mass of undigested material among his private papers and their significance was effectively lost to the world for almost 400 years. Today they are among the Royal Collection’s greatest treasures.

How revolutionary was his work in anatomy? Some of it could not be conclusively proved until the development of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners in the 1980s.

If you can’t make it to the exhibit, you can still buy the impressive iPad app designed to accompany it:

The Royal Collection’s iPad app Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy enables users to appreciate fully the astonishing accuracy of Leonardo’s work for the first time. The app includes interactive 3D anatomical models, pinch-zoom functionality and interviews with experts on Leonardo’s work and the history of medicine. It even allows users to reverse and translate the thousands of notes made by the artist in his distinctive mirror-writing, direct from the pages of his notebooks.

The app includes all of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings – 268 pages in total. Over 11 chapters the app tells the story of the greatest challenge Leonardo faced in his career as he embarked upon a campaign of dissection in hospitals and medical schools to investigate the bones, muscles, vessels and organs.

Biologic is a fun (and free!) app by Bloom that turns your social network into a simulated biological war for your attention. The people in your network are represented by cells and their posts as particles. Factors such as the frequency and popularity of the posts will determine the size of each of these elements helping guide your attention to the most important stuff going on in your networks. You can download it here.