May 5, 2011: Ghost of executed murderer

[Wombat]

Joseph Paul Jernigan (January 31, 1954 – August 5, 1993) was a Texas murderer who was executed by lethal injection at 12:31 a.m.

The image below is a real photograph of him, taken years after his death.



How it was done:

The Visible Human Project is an effort to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body, in order to facilitate anatomy visualization applications. Jernigan's cadaver was encased and frozen in a gelatin and water mixture in order to stabilize the specimen for cutting. The specimen was then cut in the axial plane at 1 millimeter intervals. Each of the resulting 1,871 slices were photographed in both analog and digital, yielding more than 65 gigabytes of data.

The images were then turned into an animation, which played them one after the other, moving from the head down to the toes....

The animation was played fullscreen on a computer, which was moved around by an assistant while being photographed in a dark environment. The resulting images are long-exposure "light paintings" of the entire cadaver. Variations in the movement of the computer during each exposure created differences in the shape of the body throughout the series.

More images and the full story at the artist's website: http://www.project1231.com/