Good article on Bat “White Nose Syndrome”

The decimation of the bison herds and the extinction of the passenger pigeon were epic environmental events. The ongoing decimation of bat populations by White Nose Syndrome (WNS) may be much more serious. Wired magazine has a good article on the subject.

Video: Bats’ Morning Return to the Bamberger Chiroptorium

I had the opportunity last week to watch the bats return to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve’s chiroptorium. The morning return isn’t as dramatic as the evening emergence, but it’s still something to see. Realizing that, for the first time, I had a device that could capture high definition (720p) video, I propped up my iPhone 4 on the fence at the mouth of the chiroptorium and let it record for about 16 minutes. I’ve edited that recording down to two minutes in the following video. It is best seen at 720p - at lower resolution, the distant bats in the descending stream aren’t visible.

As the bats swooped down and maneuvered aggressively into the cave mouth, they produced a sound that I can best describe as a rapid vibration. My guess is that the trailing edges of their wing membranes vibrate violently during those maneuvers. (Much like the end of a piece of fabric held out of the window of a fast-moving car.) Unfortunately, that sound seems to represent some sort of pathological case for the iPhone 4’s audio capture system, and, as you’ll hear in the movie, it is distorted into something that sounds very much like static. That’s disappointing, but slightly better than no sound at all, I think. So, apologies about the static. It’s not an accurate reproduction of the sound produced by the bats, but its presence and intensity does correlate with the number of bats passing the camera at any given moment, so it has some value.

It is, of course, better to experience this first-hand, but one needs special permission to do so. Being fortunate enough to have that permission, it seems the least I can do to try and share some of that unusual experience. Enjoy.

Weekend Links Unclogged

• The real Turing test: learning to say sorry.
• Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing
• Read This If You Hate Meetings
• Better world: Take Friday off… forever – I seem to recall that the American worker's productivity has doubled since the 1940s; maybe we could reduce the work week to 20 hours....
• Single Vaccine Dose, Even One from 1976, Could Protect against the H1N1 Swine Flu
• Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D – No excuse for not getting vaccinated, but very interesting.
• Vitamin D Deficiency May Increase Risk Of Colds, Flu – Again, no excuse for avoiding vaccination, but very interesting.
• NO Good: Nitric Oxide May Be Key to Overcoming Antibiotic Resistance
• 13 more things that don't make sense.
• Igniting Fusion
• Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings – If only it’d been a dead parrot.
• Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions.
• Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads.
• Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
• First Drug Shown to Extend Life Span in Mammals
• Can Aging Be Solved?
• July 16, 1867: Concrete Gets Some Positive Reinforcement
• Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies
• Rethinking the bee's waggle dance.
• Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
• Rare plant worthy of Endangered Species Act protection--But won't get it.
• Spy Satellite Sea Ice Images Finally Made Public
• Potential Neuropoison Could Be in Our Food
• Obama, Farm Industry Clash Over Antibiotics
• 8-Story Antigravity Forest Facade Takes Root
• Time Magazine: The liberal bias of facts. – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
• The Top 5 Lies About Obama's Health Care Reform
• The burden of debt.
• Why markets can’t cure healthcare.
• The Swiss Menace
• Better world: Legalise drugs
• Senate Votes to Stop Stealth Jets, Continue Pentagon Overhaul
• NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good.
• FBI compounds mystery with secret justification of gag order.
• US rogue nuke detection upgrades not worth the cost.
• Secrets, Leaks, and Outright Lies
• How to Stack a Rocket – The Ares I-X test vehicle takes shape, even as the program faces funding disaster.
• ATK test fires Ares 1 five-segment booster.
• Augustine appears before Congress about space review.
• Augustine panel presents five manned space options.
• ULA claim gap reducing solution via EELV exploration master plan – They might be proposing a great plan, but, on the other hand, when have our aerospace contractors ever tried not to steer billions of taxpayer dollars into their coffers?
• Tentative Signs of Water Found on Moon
• How to Land Safely Back on the Moon – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• Back from the Moon, Apollo Astronauts Had to Go Through Customs
• Historic Apollo landing sites imaged by new lunar orbiter.
• NASA reacquires original Moon landing footage.
• NASA High Definition Video: Partially Restored Apollo 11 Video.
• Mars, methane and mysteries.
• Cracks on Mars hint at dried-up lakes.
• Too much radiation for astronauts to make it to Mars – Not exactly new information, but it bears repeating.
• Rare meteorite found by 'fireball' observatory.
• "Green" propellant could give rockets--and the environment--a boost. – Aluminum and ice. Very nice.
• Armadillo Aerospace qualifies to win Lunar Lander Challenge level 2 – Congratulations!
• Students snap images of Earth from space for $150.
• Timeless Tom Baker Makes Return Trip to Doctor Who

Weekend Links

• Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read.
• Scientific American's "Top 10 New Species Discovered in 2008".
• Conservation setback may doom Christmas Island pipistrelle bat to extinction.
• Don't cure cancer, stablilize it.
• Racetrack Memory: The Future Third Dimension of Data Storage.
• NASA's Slender New Rocket to be Tested for Stability Before Launch.
• Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life – Naughty perchlorates.
• Mars orbiter imagery boosts Curiosity rover's life search – Evidence grows that Mars may harbor life. So, can we drop an SUV-sized rover on it?
• Great Expectations – Wayne Hale of NASA on the last Hubble servicing missing, and his conclusion that fewer servicing missions would not have meant more space telescopes. Wayne richly deserves his say on that matter. I include my thoughts below.

Were the Challenger catastrophe and the fuzzy Hubble going to kill NASA?

Wayne Hale's qualifications and experience are impeccable, and the quality of his perspective is rare (and all are infinitely superior to my own), and he raises good points. However, though it pains me to say so, I'm not yet persuaded by his arguments, as expressed in his blog entry, "Great Expectations", referenced above. I'm not convinced that NASA was on the brink of disbandment after flying Hubble with a botched mirror, and destroying Challenger and killing her crew. It was undoubtedly in deservedly terrible shape politically, and therefore some sort of penance was inevitable. Maybe that even made the first Hubble servicing mission a necessity, in order to do some repair to the reputations of Hubble, Shuttle and NASA. However, NASA has its centers and it contractors and subcontractors spread all over the nation, and killing it outright would have meant job losses in almost every state, and a great many congressional districts. That puts a lot of Senators and representatives in Congress in a very awkward situation when talking of making big changes to NASA, let alone killing the agency. Some say NASA has made a practice of spreading the work around to protect itself. In other cases, it seems that politicians have made it happen for their own benefit. In practice, it means that NASA's work, especially its human spaceflight programs, are ensured to go on in some form, provided that a minimum of congressional districts are left out in the cold by any change. (I've often wondered if this was the main reason the original Constellation architecture relied so completely on Shuttle and Shuttle-derived hardware, even where that raised obvious problems.)

I must confess that, as a child of Apollo, Shuttle has always looked to me like a dead-end and a disaster, despite the incredibly hard work that was, and is, put into it. It was over budget and behind schedule – not uncommon in such things, but as a kid those schedule slips felt like they took forever. More siginificantly, it promised two-week turnarounds, and a dramatic reduction in the cost of reaching low earth orbit, neither of which it delivered (not even close, in the former case, and quite the opposite in the latter). Of the five shuttles flown, two have failed catastrophically and a third came within inches of doing so, so its safety record is terrible, but roughly, I gather, what NASA originally predicted (98%, if memory serves). If the out-of-focus Hubble and the loss of Challenger had killed the Shuttle program, I wouldn't have missed it. If that had eventually translated into more robotic exploration, I'd've been well pleased. But I don't see how the politics of government spending would have left us without a human spaceflight program of some sort for too long (the gap between the end of Shuttle and the beginning of Ares I flights is causing enough trouble). Maybe the replacement would even have been one that could, as Constellation promises to do, take us somewhere beyond low earth orbit. Which, though I prefer the bang-for-buck that robotic exploration delivers, I must admit still excites the child of Apollo in me.

Early Perseids in Armadillo Central

There's a herd of cattle watching me, about fifty feet away, as far as I can tell from their eyeshine in the beam of a red flashlight. Big pairs of red dots pointed this way. Small flies keep landing on the iPhone keyboard and getting themsleves smeared around before flying off indignantly, but, regrettably, not permanently. Screech owls and a coyote are proclaiming their territorial rights as dawn draws near, to make such issues moot for another day. My camera clicks off one more frame every 30 seconds. An old windmill groans in the wind.

I sit in this pasture deep in the heart of Texas this night counting meteors and crossing my fingers that a few of these early Perseids really did pass through my camera's too limited field of view before winking out of existence.

That, and cursing the weather. When I arrived out here shortly after moonset, the sky was covered with a film of clouds. First magnitude stars didn't so much shine as ooze their light through. They seemed more like acne on the face of the clouds than the local jewels of our cosmos.

But one or two Perseids managed to make themselves seen, even through that. And then, at the cost of the night vision in one eye, and mostly because it seemed so wonderfully improbable to be doing so, I sent an email from this cow pasture, many miles from anywhere, to an old friend in the UK. And before my night vision could return, my phone vibrated and connected me to someone I used to talk to everyday, but now haven't seen in years, more or less. That this was all possible still leaves me a little amazed.

And as we spoke, filling some of the gap of years, I looked up to find that the sky was almost clear and Perseids were falling. Some came head on and looked like flash bulbs going off deep in the sky. Most came as bright streaks; some of them large enough to leave behind glowing tails. Others seemed too small to be seen alone, and therefore chose to arrive in clouds of their own kind. A patch of sky would momentarily, and ever so slightly, brighten as they all burned together.

I counted about 30 Perseids in all, before the clouds returned and sealed away the night sky for good.

Tomorrow is the peak of the shower (starting around 1:45 AM, when the moon sets), but the weather forecast promises much worse conditions for the occasion, so I took what I could get this night, and, of course, I curse the weather.

Dawn is nearly here. A bat just flew by, making sure it goes to bed with a full belly. The cattle are coming. I should be going.

It is amazing to be able to post from here.

Bats, Bambergers and Networking

With the kind permission of my boss, I took a day off from work on Thursday and slipped down to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve, to provide moral and technical support while another fragment of the 21st century took up residence there. In this particular case, satellite Internet access. If you're thinking "Satellite Internet? Huge latency, low speed? No, thanks." Well, yes, but try getting anything better in much of rural America, and you'll find that that's as good as it gets. It's as if rural electrification had only gone as far as providing every household enough power for one 15 watt light bulb, had declared victory, and stopped. For the purposes of this metaphor, the 15 watt bulb is a modem that probably can't achieve a connection faster than 24 Kbps, and that may drop its connection at any time. When that's your only alternative, the problems associated with satellite Internet access don't look quite so bad. But it's a lousy situation any way you look at it, and nothing for America to be proud of.

As usual, I drove down to the ranch in the middle of the night, after all the traffic had gone to bed. For a change, I left at a time early enough that I arrived there with several hours to spare before I needed to crash in the guest quarters so that I could get enough sleep to regain consciousness by noon. A cloudy night ruled-out using that time for night-sky photography, but I thought a visit to the chiroptorium might be interesting, even though I didn't think that the Mexican free-tailed bats that predominantly reside there had yet returned in full force from their southern wintering grounds.

Nonetheless, standing near the chiroptorium's mouth in the night's thick darkness, I found bats whooshing and flapping invisibly past me from every direction, as they hunted flying insects and came and went from their roosts. There's an actual wind that blows around you from all of their aerial exertions. It's an experience most people will never have in any form, and it's a shame that I can think of no good way to share it. I'll just have to count myself lucky (which I do) that I've had the experience, and join the Bambergers and others in encouraging the preservation of existing bat roosts, and the creation of artificial bat roosts to educate, to compensate for lost habitat, and to actively & naturally control insect populations.

Of course, I had to try to get some pictures. That turned-out to be both easier and harder than I'd expected. Picking a manual focus point and getting enough light from the flash was less trouble than I'd expected. Getting a usable shutter-speed was a problem I never did manage to solve. The trouble was that my Canon Digital Rebel XTi wouldn't allow the selection of a shutter speed faster than 1/200th of a second when the flash was used, even in full-manual mode. And 1/200th of a second is too long an exposure to freeze a bat in flight. In fact, it's so long that not only were the bats motion-blurred, but they were also consistently overexposed, even when shooting at f6.3. The camera's manual confirmed that 1/200th of a second was the shutter speed limit when using flash, but didn't explain why the limit was imposed. I hope it's not a case of Canon artificially limiting the features of their lower-end digital SLRs in order to make their more expensive models look better by comparison. (They've done this in the past, notably with the original Digital Rebel.)

Bearing in mind all of those problems, a few not-completely-awful photos were obtained, all of Mexican free-tailed bats, as you can see below.

I'll have to try building my own motion-activated shutter-release before I attempt this sort of bat photography again, and, more importantly, I'll have to investigate whether an external flash (or something) will enable much higher shutter speeds. If I can put such problems behind me, I think some impressive photos should be possible. (And if it'll work with bats, it'll work with all manner of critters, including my friends the owls....)

Anyway, after a few hours of being a nuisance to flying mammals, I had to pack it in and try to get enough sleep so that I could be useful by the time the satellite Internet installer arrived sometime that afternoon.

David Bamberger, even on the brink of eighty, is a morning person, if ever there was one. What's more, he's an energetic morning person. But I like him anyway. At least, I do until he starts moving his sheet metal collection back and forth across the car-port/office to which the guest quarters are attached. His wife, Margaret, maintains that he has no such collection, but, although I've never seen it, I know better, because I've heard it many times in what would otherwise have been my sleep. As something of a night-owl by nature, I'm accustomed to a certain amount of such conflict with the rest of the world, and, of course, I hate to be an ungrateful guest, but David Bamberger's phantom morning sheet metal collection deserves mention, I believe, if only so it can be added to the next compilation of David Bamberger lore. It exists. Somewhere. I swear.

So, being awake in time for the arrival of the satellite installer turned-out to be no problem at all, though subsequently maintaing a convincing impression of alertness, or even consciousness, was trickier than I ordinarily like. Nonetheless, the satellite Internet installation went smoothly enough, and the Bambergers were subsequently able, for instance, to use Google Earth for the first time. It's not like they don't know the lay of their land intimately, but they need maps, same as anybody, to keep track of where things are, to aid in planning, and to look at the land from perspectives unavailable to a person standing on it. And for a lot of those purposes, especially the latter, the interactive viewpoint provided by Google Earth makes even the nicest aerial photographs and topographic maps look kinda sad. So that was two big thumbs-up for modern technology, until, that is, we let their iMac start downloading the Apple software updates that had accumulated in the six weeks since I'd last brought them a disc of updates. About halfway through downloading the updates, we hit a bandwidth utilization limit imposed by HughesNet, and Internet access stopped dead, as far as we could tell. I understand the need to regulate bandwidth utilization, but Hughes' essentially all-or-nothing approach is throttling only in the sense of strangulation. So, it seems that the Bambergers have traded a metaphorical 15 watt bulb that can be used all the time, if they don't mind it flickering on and off at random, for a 60 watt bulb that shines steadily until it decides to turn itself off until some time the following day. If this was rural electrification, the history books would have written it off as a failure.

The abrupt uselessness of the satellite Internet connection notwithstanding, there remained the small matter of getting bits flowing from the office, where the dish and satellite modem were installed for the benefit of a shiny, new iMac, to the neighboring house where Margaret's iBook G4 was anxiously awaiting them. Using the iMac's wireless Internet sharing feature was the obvious solution, but the office sits lower-down on its hill than does the house, so the radio signals would have to penetrate a fair amount of rock and earth to reach the house, and past tests proved that that they had little inclination to do so. To work around this problem without buying a small flock of wireless routers, or trying to snake an Ethernet cable through the underground AC wiring conduits that connect the two structures, I'd purchased a pair of NetGear HDX101 powerline Ethernet adaptors in the hope of sending the Ethernet signals through that AC wiring.

Gentle readers, do not try this at home.

The HDX101 boxes were miserable failures. It's not that they didn't work at all, it's that they could only get a signal to a few of the electrical outlets in the house nearest to the point where the wiring from the office came in. And all of those outlets were on the opposite end of the house from the waiting iBook. And bandwidth tests (60-second runs of iperf 1.7, using TCP) conducted from the outlets where the box did work showed that no two outlets would provide the same amount of bandwidth, though they all had in common that they provided only a tiny fraction of the 200 Mbps claimed by NetGear. Specifically, they varied between 0.7 Mbps and 8.1 Mbps. I knew the 200 Mbps claim was marketing fiction when I bought the HDX101 boxes, but I'd hoped to get at least a quarter of the rated speed. Instead, the best case was a mere 4%. Of course, the boxes impose some quality-of-service (QoS) limits on the traffic they carry, and configuring the QoS settings might have made a little difference, but the easy, browser-based configuration that was promised, turned-out to be available only on Windows machines. Oh, thank you, NetGear.

So, I'll be returning those pricey little gadgets. That's a hassle I could definitely live without, but at least I knew enough to be able to nail-down specific performance numbers on which to base the keep-'em/take-'em-back decision. I worry that other consumers would not know how to do so, and would assume that the devices were working properly just because their nifty little blue LEDs lit-up, and some data struggled its way between them. The fact that the data rate would seem a bit low in some (or many) situations, might not tip-off the unsuspecting consumer to just how poorly the devices were delivering on their expensive promises. If the unlucky consumer is getting only 4% of the alleged 200 Mbps performance of a $170 pair of these devices, they're getting the equivalent of just $7 of the performance for which they paid. If the devices sensed their own performance shortcomings and, say, automatically issued a $163 refund in such a case, these devices could be worth the trouble. But NetGear would probably find a way to implement their refund mechanism such that it only worked in Windows, too.

Next time, I'll try a small flock of wireless routers. They'll be hard-pressed to perform worse, or to be more idiosyncratic (and that's saying something), and they should be less expensive, too. Heck, their browser-based configuration might even manage to be non-platform specific. Such miracles.

The Bamberger Ranch Chiroptorium - Main Chamber VR Panorama

The chiroptorium is the artificial bat cave constructed by the Bambergers to try to bring a substantial bat population to the ranch. Like many others, I've photographed it from outside, but all that really shows is the big, artificial cave mouth. I haven't seen any photos of the interior since it was under construction (it was a work of art before its surface was covered with concrete and the whole structure buried). So, I've thought for a while that a spherical panorama ought to be shot inside it in order to clearly show people the end-result of that construction. However, the chiroptorium's success, in the form of the 120,000 Mexican free-tail bats that occupied it this year, kept me from entering to shoot a panorama before last Tuesday, December 4th, because we didn't want to risk disturbing the bats. With the arrival of winter the free-tails have returned to Mexico, so the chiroptorium's only residents are many hundreds of cave myotis tucked-away in the warmth of a pair of internal bat boxes, and untold legions of flesh-eating dermestid beetles occupying the foot or more of accumulated bat guano that covers the cave floors wall-to-wall. The consensus was that I could enter without disturbing the myotis, provided that I wasn't disturbed by the flesh-eating beetles. A pair of rubber boots proved to be adequate for keeping the beetles at bay, and the shoot went smoothly, to the continuous accompaniment of the chattering myotis.

The result is the following high dynamic-range, high-resolution QuickTime VR panorama. The panorama is 8.4 MB, so it may take some time to load.

The panorama initially looks from the main chamber into the exit tunnel. If you were an exiting bat, that's where you'd be headed. The tunnel to the right of that leads to the smaller second chamber, which leads in-turn to the very small, inner-most third chamber. The main chamber shown here is the best exemplar of the chiroptorium's design. Key features include the following:

• The chiroptorium was designed as sequence of intersecting domes. The domes were formed from an elaborate weave of rebar, which was then covered with metal mesh. Concrete thickened with fiberglass was sprayed onto the mesh (without that thickener, the concrete went right through the mesh). The richly textured interior surface created by that concrete is a design feature - it provides innumerable footholds for the bats. When construction was complete, the chiroptorium, built at the bottom of a small valley, was covered with earth, thus effectively filling-in much of the valley, and transforming the domes into a cave. (A large drain pipe prevents the remaining portion of the valley from forming a lake behind the cave, and keeps the cave floor dry.)
• The floor is covered with years of accumulated bat guano, which, when I encountered it, was a dry, almost fluffy layer of material, that must have been somewhere around a foot deep over the entire area of the floor. It is home to (among other things) a large population of flesh-eating dermestid beetles, which eat fallen bats. (Some of the white specks visible on the surface of the guano are bones. Some of the black, shiny specks are the beetles.) The invertebrate population of the chiroptorium is being studied by researchers who are interested in learning how the invertebrate populations typically found in bat-occupied caves establish themselves. Since the chiroptorium began as a clean slate, so to speak, the chiroptorium probably represents a unique opportunity for such studies.
• The ceiling of the dome is interrupted by three concentric vertical rings of concrete. They provide additional surface area on which bats may roost.
• Two bat boxes, one square and one rectangular, hang from the ceiling. They were a part of the chiroptorium from the beginning. Their purpose was to provide roosts for the initial population of bats. Their compactness is a feature with a small population: tightly packed into those boxes, the bats keep each other warm. At the time this panorama was shot, both boxes were filled with cave myotis bats, which find the boxes to be ideal winter roosts.
• The large tubes extending up through the ceiling are ventilation shafts, though they are not used while bats are present.
• The wood set into the wall covers the viewing gallery's windows. Those windows turned-out to be the reason that the chiroptorium went for years without acquiring a population of bats. I've heard conflicting explanations of why the windows were a problem for the bats, but, whatever the reason, once the windows were covered, the bats found the chiroptorium (now minus its "torium"-ness) a very agreeable home.
  
  Margaret Bamberger supplies some details on the conflicting explanations regarding the windows: "Either/or or both are true (probably): (1) When flying around in daylight bats use eyesight for navigation. If light came through the window from the other side, it would look like an opening, and they'd fly into it. (2) Glass doesn't send back a signal to the bat's echolocation, because it has no surface variation, and the bats don't know that it is there. Bats will swoop down and try to drink from very flat surfaces that are horizontal. They have no experience with such surfaces on a vertical plane, except where humans put them. In a cave built for them it becomes a huge problem."
  
  (I first met David Bamberger at a Bat Conservation International (BCI) outing to Bracken Cave, whose purchase he had years earlier organized on behalf of BCI. Having seen an article about the construction of the chiroptorium in the BCI newsletter years before, I asked him how the project had turned-out. He paused, then said unhappily "let me put it this way: I'm currently housing bats at five thousand dollars a head." During that period, I gather the chiroptorium was labelled by some as "Bamberger's Folly." It took years to realize that the observation gallery windows were the problem, but as soon as the windows were covered, the bats came, stayed, and bred, making the chiroptorium a bigger success with each passing year.)

Margaret Bamberger can say a great deal more about every aspect of the chiroptorium, and what they've learned from it about constructing artificial bat habitat. Post questions to her blog as comments, and I'm sure she'll have plenty to say.

Photographic Notes

This panorama is composed of 12 segments, each photographed at three different exposures: 30, 8 and 2 seconds, all at f8 and ISO 400. Nothing less could produce useful exposures using only the dim, indirect light coming in through the entry tunnel. The images, totaling 364 megapixels, were assembled into three separate panoramas, which were combined into a single high-dynamic range image, then tonemapped down to a range that monitors can handle. Unfortunately, using only three exposures per segment still left the entry tunnel over-exposed, which is exactly the sort of thing that high-dynamic range photography is meant to prevent. My camera will only take three different exposures automatically, so taking additional exposures would have meant a lot of manual manipulation of the camera. Such manipulation brings with it the danger of causing the tripod to shift its footing, thereby ruining the precise alignment of the images. (The spiked feet of my tripod never did find the concrete floor - eventually I just made them stable in the guano.) That limitation may have been fortunate, however: the HDR and image manipulation applications that I depend on kept choking on the size of these images. In the end, it seemed like pure luck that I finally got them to do their jobs. An additional exposure or two might have prevented the tools from ever doing their jobs.

With the three panoramas finally combined into a single rectilinear image (360° by 180°), that image was broken into six images, corresponding to the faces of a cube. Doing so made it possible to heavily retouch the image of the floor to remove the tripod, the panoramic head and its counter-weight from the image. (In other words, the floor seen beneath the caption and copyright notice is an artificial construct.) The cube faces, including the heavily retouched floor face, were then combined to make the final QuickTime VR panorama.