The Vela Pulsar and its surrounding pulsar wind nebula. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Welcome to our periodic roundup of all that is queer and kooky in the world of photography.  Here’s what made the news in the past 24 hours.

If you don’t know what NGC 6872 is, be informed that it is the World Champion, er, we mean the Cosmos Champion, galaxy.  ‘Size?’ you ask?  Suffice it to say it is measured in the hundreds of thousands of light years.  Here’s a picture of it.  While you’re at it, scroll about halfway down and view over 50 ‘Amazing Space Photos’.

Before moving away from the Huffington Post and the Cosmos but scaling down in size, check out this photo of the Vela Pulsar.  The headline isn’t lying when it says that Vela resembles the Phantom of the Opera’s mask!

EarthSky has identified five science apps to check out in 2013 and two of them are photograph-oriented apps, of which one allows us to stay with our outer space theme.  That’s the NASA app which includes a staggering 157,000-plus artefacts including space photos!    

If you’re less into outer space and more into Gaia, go for SciSpy.  It is a nature sharing app that lets you stay in touch with fellow Gaians and features automatic geotagging.

We’re not done with out space theme yet!  ‘The Afronauts’ sounds like a gag or joke but it’s not.  It’s the name of a book that is about a Zambian who was “a dreamer rather than a crazy man, a loser,” as described by the photojournalist author of the book, Christina de Middel.

An abortive mission to Mars by the Zambian eccentric in the mid-1960s inspired Middel to create a series of photographs recreating the man’s ‘dream’.  She must have done well because the first edition of this photo book is sold out and it has been short-listed for a German prize.

Let’s get ‘down to earth’ and close out with some really funky landscapes courtesy of Google Earth.  No tilt-shift camera could have captured these nor could Photoshop in its wildest dreams have achieved what Google Earth has done so effortlessly.

Apparently, Google Earth’s software is a little too smart for its own good.  The 3D images it produced by way of texture mapping are more like ‘6D’ images – they have a few extra ‘D’s – and is that D for Dimension or D for Dunce?

Dimension or Dunce, Google’s outdone Dali: the great artist only melted clocks while Google Earth melts entire highways!