Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the thought of space and the vast empty spaces between planets and galaxies.
This image shows a map of our Universe with galaxies colour coded to indicate their red shift. The red shift is a manifestation of the Doppler Effect- when a car moves away from you, if you hear its horn, the frequency of the horn drops as it gets further away. The horn’s frequency hasn’t actually changed, just that the sound has further to travel and so sounds lower. The light from an object moving away lowers frequency towards the red end of the spectrum; that’s the red shift.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Social Wallpapering is a public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop backgrounds. Supported resolutions include 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, and all other background variations with a minimum width and height of 1280×720 pixels.
Technically this is a pretty advanced website- animated menus, using the latest Web 2.0 Ajax techniques. You can upload your own wallpapers, as well as rate others and share with your friends. There are even torrents for bittracker so you can downloads packs of wallpapers. Very clever stuff!
Popularity: 4% [?]
This is pretty. It’s a selection of highlighted locations from Google Maps that can be set as your PC’s wallpaper. You can choose one of five sizes from 1023 x 768 to 1,920 x 1.200. If you see somewhere interesting looking then send it in as a suggestion.
There are currently 29 places- you can see the squares at the top of the screen, just click to select. The picture highlighted shows fields from Kazakhstan.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Dual and even triple screen computers are fairly common place now and single screen wall papers just don’t cut the mustard. On Flickr.com, you can find a very nice selection of wide screen images, including the one pictured above at 5128 x 1604.
I suspect you may need to be a paid up member (I am!) to download the bigger images!
Popularity: 6% [?]