Star Trails

A time-lapse exposure captures the streaks made by stars over sandstone formations in Utah. Photographers capture "star trails," the movement of stars across the night sky, by keeping the camera shutter open for hours instead of seconds.

Photograph by Bruce Dale

Star trails streak above palm trees in Baja California, Mexico.

Photograph by Bill Hatcher

Star streaks glow in a purple sky above the Mitten buttes of Monument Valley, Arizona.

Photograph by Michael Nichols

Star trails spiral across the night sky above Joshua Tree National Park in California.

Photograph by Tim Laman

Star trails pop over Mariscal Canyon in Big Bend National Park, Texas.

Photograph by Jack Dykinga

Star trails radiate in the sky above trees in the Salmon River wilderness of Idaho.

Photograph by Michael Nichols

Maltese Falcon - The Biggest Boat

If I were rich...
We all have our dreams, but some of us can make them true. Undoubtedly, one of those people is Tom Perkins.
When he turned 70, he decided to build the biggest, riskiest, fastest, most technologically advanced, single-hulled sailing luxury mega yacht in the world. The 289-foot Maltese Falcon, launched in spring 2006, is that engineering dream come to life.
The project has taken Perkins, his designers and Perini's team of 300 laborers more than five years to create this unique vessel and the masts were developed by English company Insensys to have a a fiber-optic sensor system that gathers data on wind speed and force and helps the sails work more efficiently. It has taken history's largest single order of carbon fiber for her masts ("There's more carbon in Falcon's masts than in a Stealth bomber," Perkins claims)
The 289-foot steel-hulled yacht is, at her heart, the modern incarnation of a square-rigged clipper ship.
She is traditional to the point of being old-fashioned in some areas, yet modern with technology that is beyond cutting edge. She is incredibly complicated from an engineering and construction standpoint, yet she is quite simple to sail.
And amazing to look at.

Maltese Falcon, the $100 million megayacht that the designers claim is the largest and fastest personal sailboat in the world, created for venture capitalist Tom Perkins.

The 87.5-meter yacht has three masts which rotate depending on the wind direction.


The Maltese Falcon is the perfect blend of ego and utility, wonder that represents the most daring advance in sailing technology in 150 years.









The interior of the boat is perfectly harmonized with its exterior.









It is a push-button boat in a very literal sense. "I can teach anyone to sail this boat in thirty minutes," Perkins claims. Control panel with touch-sensitive displays of the 15 sails, each with three buttons: furl, unfurl and stop. "It takes only minutes for the boat to tack—just think, you don't have all those lines and rigging to run around."