Google just launched a Google Earth feature that lets you view select paintings from The Prado Museum in astonishing details:

The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. Using Google Earth, art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist’s brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance.

The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)

Link (with a pretty nifty embedded YouTube clip for those of us who don’t have Google Earth installed) – via The Lede Blog

Photo: Geoff Pingree / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest

W00t! It’s time for Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey game – but first, here’s the story behind the photo, titled "Behold". It’s the Grand Prize winner of National Geographic’s Traveler’s "World in Focus" photo contest, and taken by Geoff Pingree of Oberlin, Ohio (he won a 15-day trip for two to Antarctica aboard the National Geographic Endeavor, which makes our prizes here on Neatorama look downright puny in comparison!):

Pingree, a professor of Cinema Studies and English at Oberlin College, took this photograph at Madrid’s Prado Museum, which was staging theatrical performances inspired by masterworks by Spanish artists. "The photo shows performers playing Spanish King Philip IV and his second wife, Mariana of Austria," he said.

Link – Thanks Marilyn!

Now, on to the contest. The funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud cat comic by Adam Koford. Place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you’d like.

Don’t forget to check out Adam’s blog for inspiration! Good luck!

Update 12/17/08 – Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to Adam D. Jones who won with this caption: “You said everyone would be wearing a costume!”