A couple of years back, an excellent photographer Satoru Yoshioka visited SLAC to take photos for his portfolio. Since then he has been named Best Science Photographer of the Year 2008 by a British photographic society, for his portfolio of work from many of the world’s high-energy physics labs. But back when he took photos, I was very taken by his spare style and spent a long time looking at his photos. I noticed in a few photos something that stood out. Many of the locations and facilities at SLAC have numbers painted, engraved, or somehow imprinted on them. And that had some appeal to me that I couldn’t quite explain, but I found it interesting.

And so the idea was born: I wanted to create a tour of SLAC by the numbers. I would take a set of photographs on the site of SLAC, each outdoors and containing a number, and then pin them all to a Google Maps layer so that somebody could click through in numerical order or just dash around the virtual site and see a different view of the lab.

I make no claims to being a good photographer. This is more a proof of principle project.

I haven’t found all the numbers yet but have posted a bunch of them in a custom map, without any of the real bells and whistles that the Google Maps API would allow, but it’s a start.

As time goes on, I’ll find more numbers and add more photos, but here it is for now: