"Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun." A set on flickr.

Khristian Mendoza's "Transparency" set. What a great idea. (via tat)

In October of last year, Big Picture ran a series of aerial photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand but was asked to take down most of them because of an upcoming exhibition. Half a year later, they feature a set of Jason Hawkes' pictures.

I especially like #14 which shows a nice example for the concept of desire paths.

There are four beautiful shots of rural landscapes in Shaun Sundholm's "you probably came here to see this" photo set on flickr. Higher resolution versions would make great wallpapers. (Preferably without the writing. Slogans on desktop's get old really fast.) (probably via tat)

Four minutes of flickr browsing later: Okay, never mind.

NASA's Cassini orbiter flew another mile or two to take more pictures of drop shadows, moons and other incredibly awesome objects around Saturn.

Pictures like this make my head hurt. Try to figure out where every planet "is" in the sun system in order to get this picture.

The simplicity of most of Josef Schulz' pictures might seem to be a little bit boring, but is definitely stylish, too. It reminds me of the tidy look of sci-fi films like 2001, Gattaca or Solaris – just more colourful. (via tat)

A gallery with spring-related pictures from the northern hemisphere on Big Picture.

The New York Times added a gallery showing members of Obama's staff. Some of the people on the team are quite young. Obama's youngest assistant, Eugene Kang, is 24 years old, Jon Favreau, his now-famous speechwriting director, is 27.

Thurs., Jan. 15, 09 Breakers Beach, Chicago. A poetic picture. (via coudal)

The Earth from above, from way above, on Big Picture. Some of the landscape patterns are simply beautiful.

ariel.chico's photostream on Flickr.

David Paul Bayles' pictures of falling trees. (via things magazine)

A fast-paced video collage of lots of great photos taken in Japan. Wanderlust.

Scenes from the Gaza Strip at Big Picture.

Eirik Solheim took images from the same spot (a couple of trees) over the year and merged them to a series of time-lapse videos. Try to watch this in fullscreen HD, it looks so much better.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from above. Lots of gorgeous pictures that are free for personal use.

Video of the moon transiting earth. Imagine where you have to place the camera to take these pictures.

Big Picture's "The year 2008 in photographs". (Part 2, part 3.)

Katarina Stefanović's landscape photographs at Flickr seem to be photoshopped quite a bit but they're nice anyway.

The next President of the United States on Big Picture. Congratulations, Barack Obama!

Searching for a phantom. The picture in question was taken by Roger Fenton. Just kidding. I love these stories.

(Partially related: Robert Johnson Radio on last.fm)

NASA's Cassini orbiter took close-up images of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. If these images won't take your breath away, I don't know what will.

Photos at flickr tagged with "worldheritage".