The Big Picture has a great set of photos from NASA’s final Hubble Servicing Mission. As we speak Space Shuttle Atlantis is leaving the telescope and preparing for a return back to Earth. This picture shows astronaut John Grunsfeld holding onto a handrail of the Hubble Telescope a few days ago. Head on over to The Big Picture to see more awesome pictures.

Cloud Gate, nicknamed ‘The Bean’ because of its bean-like shape, is a sculpture in Chicago by British artist Anish Kapoor. The highly polished 100-ton steel structure was unveiled in May 2006 and forms the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park. I’ve seen it several times and think it’s a really cool sculpture. Here are some photos from our visit last Saturday:

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Check out this huge picture of Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington DC as he gave his speech. It’s a whopping 1,474 megapixels! You can zoom in and see all the faces of the people in the audience. I’ve been trying to find Oprah because I didn’t see her all day while watching the coverage on TV and I was wondering if she was even there. Can you find Oprah?

Arby is 14 years old and today, for the first time ever, he went inside a paper bag. He went in for about 30 seconds first, much too short for us to grab a photo. But a few minutes later, he went back inside and even laid down in it for a couple of minutes!

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Artists around the globe have been inspired by Barack Obama’s message of hope and change and many have made works of art featuring Obama’s portrait. The most famous one has been the iconic HOPE poster by Shepard Fairey, but many other artists and supporters of the campaign have made more unusual portraits using different materials like butter and beans. Here’s a collection of twenty of these unique portraits featuring the 44th President of the United States. Let’s hope that after tomorrow people continue to be inspired by all the good work that Obama will deliver and continue to make more of these weird portraits to honor the man.

1. Obama made of nanotubes by the University of Michigan

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We have another cold front coming in here in the next few days, with several snow showers. Also in my native country of the Netherlands they are having very low temperatures these days. There’s a great post on The Big Picture today of all things frozen around the world, which includes this nice picture of Dutch skaters:

Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas! The following picture from December 2004 shows our cat Alex with a Santa hat. Alex died in October this year.

The Big Picture has the most incredible photographs of the year up on their website in three parts: 1, 2 and 3. Unfortunately a lot of the 120 pictures of 2008 are about violence, destruction and natural disasters, but there’s a lot of positive ones too. Here are some of my favorites.

Construction site of the new China Central Television HQ building in Beijing. Check out those large cranes on top of the building! Reminds me a little of the leaning towers in Madrid.

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One of my favorite blogs in my Google Reader is The Big Picture from the Boston Globe. Each post features a series of incredible photos from recent news stories. Here are some of my favorite features from the last few months. Click each photo to go to the post for more. More »