Etsy / Colleen and Eric Whiteley

The Northstar Table by Colleen and Eric Whiteley won the grand prize in the "Space Craft" contest held by NASA and the Etsy online crafts market.

Being called a spacey artist isn't such a jab for the four winners of a design contest meant to celebrate NASA programs. The makers of the winning entry — the Northstar Table with a North Star button that opens a hidden drawer when pressed — will even travel to Florida to watch the next shuttle launch.

The "Space Craft" contest, a collaboration between NASA and the Etsy online crafts market, aimed to help inform Etsy's 5.8 million members, the majority of whom are women, about NASA's present and future exploration plans.

There were three categories — 2-D original art, 2-D art reproductions, and 3-D art including wearable items. More than 600 people entered an original handmade item or work of art. The entries were whittled down to 50 semifinalists, and voting was opened to Esty's members. Final judging was held March 18 by a panel of experts including former NASA astronaut Steve Robinson, artists and journalists. 

The winners
The grand prize went to Colleen and Eric Whitely from Brooklyn for their detailed Northstar Table. The pattern on the table represents the night sky on the evening of the first moon landing. The one-of-a-kind table has a price tag of $2,800.

In addition to the all-expenses-paid trip to Florida to watch the space shuttle Endeavour launch on April 19, Colleen and Eric received a $500 shopping spree on Etsy. Winners of the categories each received a $250 Etsy shopping spree and a bag of NASA and Esty swag.

Etsy / Rachel Barry Hobson

"High Texture Hand Embroidery of the Moon" Won the 2-D Original category of the Space Craft contest.

Rachael Barry Hobson from Austin, Texas, won the 2-D category for her $999 piece titled "High Texture Hand Embroidery of the Moon," which the judges said stood out for its breathtaking details.

Hobson, a self-described space geek who went to space camp when she was 12, notes that when she views the moon through a telescope, "I get weak in the knees."

Etsy / Nikkita Karsan Bhakta

"Universal Thoughts" by Nikkita Karsan Bhakta won the 2-D Reproduction category in the "Space Craft" contest.

The 2-D reproduction prize went to Nikkita Karsan Bhakta from Mobile, Ala., for her "Universal Thoughts." She says of the $35 reproduction: "My original goal was to photograph trails of smoke and succeeded doing so by experimenting with India ink and water. It was later that I discovered the uncanny, visual parallels between the ink trails and images I have seen from space."

Etsy / Patrick Burt

The titanium ring titled "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" won Etsy's top prize in the 3-D category.

Patrick Burt from Tempe, Ariz., won the 3-D category with a titanium ring embedded with silver, gold and diamonds titled "Brother Sun, Sister Moon." The jewels represent stars, the sun, moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and an intricately cut Saturn. The ring can be custom-ordered for $825.

For more photos of the finalists and show your support for spacey artists, check out the contest page.

It's the start of a New Year — giving us 31,557,600 seconds to check off all those things we resolved to do as we celebrated the end of 2010. That seems like plenty of time, right? Before you procrastinate, though, check out this video above.

Norway's Eirik Solheim created the video, which uses time-lapse photography to condense the passage of a year into just 40 seconds — a beautiful illustration of the changes of the seasons that sometimes escape us when time marches at its regular beat.

Let it also serve as a reminder that before we know it winter will be over, spring will have sprung into summer, the fall harvest will be done and holiday shopping will be upon once again. So don't wait for tomorrow, 2012 is just around the corner.

Since the success of the "one year in 40 seconds" video, which Solheim made in 2008, he's upped the ante with a "one year in 90 seconds" video, shown below. This one uses a slightly different method, which involves morphing short video clips into each other to add action to the seasonal scenes.

You can view more videos from the series at Solheim's website, where he explains how he made them by placing his camera at the same spot in Oslo, Norway, at regular intervals throughout the year.

For more amazing time-lapse photography, check out the links below:

• The big blizzard … in 40 seconds
• This is what life in New York feels like
• How to spend 1 million dollars in just over 12 minutes
• Time lapse shows fast-paced work at 9/11 site
• See a meteor shower in a minute

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Peter Trusler via Cambridge U. Press

A Leaellynasaura hatching emerges in this illustration by Peter Trusler, published in "The Artist and the Scientists." Click to see a slideshow tracing the process of turning fossils of long-dead species into artistic reconstructions of those species.

How do you turn a bunch of bones into a gorgeous picture of a Gorgosaurus? In a newly published book, two paleontologists and an artist from Australia describe the process that's worked for them for more than 30 years.

"The Artist and the Scientists: Bringing Prehistory to Life" is a 320-page coffee-table volume that packs in scores of beautiful images of long-extinct species, ranging from the Precambrian era to the megafauna that humans may have had a hand in wiping out. But the point of the book isn't merely to present pretty pictures.

The Monash Science Center's Patricia Vickers-Rich and her husband, Museum Victoria's Thomas Rich, write about the paleontological groundwork that they do to figure out how extinct species looked — and how they lived. Freelance artist Peter Trusler, who was trained in zoology at Monash University, writes about how he builds on that groundwork to flesh out his pictures of those species. But it's clear that their method is not just a one-way assembly line leading from the fossils to the finished product.

"Sometimes the horse leads the cart, and sometimes the cart leads the horse," Trusler told me.

The way Trusler sees it, his illustrations are often "another one of the investigative tools in science to try to increase our understanding." And the Riches appreciate what he does.

"Peter is not only an artist," Thomas Rich told me. "He's also a very well-qualified scientist. He could have easily gone down that academic route, so you're not talking about a person who just draws pretty pictures."

Patricia Vickers-Rich agreed: "He's basically a scientist, too. He just happens to be a scientist who has a good style of art. ... We've got a very special guy there."

Trusler, who will be going for his Ph.D. under Vickers-Rich's guidance, goes out on expeditions just like the other scientists. "In some cases, I've sent Peter in the field in place of me," Vickers-Rich said. "If there was not a lot of money, I would send him."

Tom Rich recalled the time Trusler went out and gathered up some ginkgo leaves, then cut incisions into the leaves to get an idea of what the ancient Ginkgoides australis species looked like. Trusler often asks questions about how a particular anatomical feature might have worked, or how a creature's surroundings might have looked in ancient times. "If we couldn't provide the answers, he would go out and find a way to supply the answers," Rich said.

It's not cheap to document the discoveries made by paleontologists, Vickers-Rich pointed out. Supporting the effort requires major-league fundraising.

"It doesn't just come in your back door and somebody says, 'Here's $100,000, now go for it,'" she said. "Therefore, if you're going to do something like that, you need to be as accurate as you possibly can. From the point of view of a scientist, why would want a generic background? If you're going to put something out there that's unique, you don't want to just paint a green tree. You've got to know what kind of leaves to put on it. You have to know how tall it might have grown. You have to know the soil type. You have to know the geochemistry ... you need to know all that. I think what makes this art somewhat different from a great number of art pieces out there is, that care has been taken. If you're going to do generic, you just don't do what I do."

The better-than-generic results of the team's labors are on full display in the book — fossils gathered during the Riches' travels in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Americas, Africa and eastern Europe, plus sketches and paintings by Trusler that end up providing a photorealistic view of the past. The artist as well as the scientists are based in Australia, so much of their story is set Down Under. But their work has become known worldwide.

Peter Trusler

This panorama of ancient megafauna was created for an Australian stamp panel. Top row, left to right: Genyornis newtoni, Diprotodon optatum, Procoptodon goliah. Bottom row: Magalania prisca, Thylacoleo carinfex and Thylacinus cynocephalus. Click to see a slideshow tracing the process of turning fossils of long-dead species into artistic reconstructions of those species.

The weirdest pictures come not from the age of the dinosaurs, but from earlier or later — from the Precambrian, for example, a time when body plans apparently took on strange shapes that are hardly ever seen today. Or from the time when giant birds and mammals ruled the roost in Australia, just before the humans arrived.

You won't find feathered dinosaurs amid the pages of "The Artist and the Scientists," but stay tuned. Thomas Rich says he's focusing in on sites in Australia that are similar to China's Liaoning deposits, where the best evidence of dinosaur feathers has been found.  Right now he has his eye on fossil beds near Koonwarra. "That's where we should go and look really hard for feathered dinosaurs," he said.

Meanwhile, Trusler is trying to figure out how to render a particular species of ichthyosaur, the ancient marine reptiles that ruled the seas while the dinosaurs held sway on land. "I don't have an idea in my head about what the final appearance of this animal is going to be," he said. "Your creativity is at play to a certain degree all the time, but the ultimate product is quite a mystery."

Thankfully, it's a mystery Trusler doesn't have to tackle alone. That's the main message of "The Artist and the Scientists."

"It's not simply a step-by-step process, in terms of me translating something that's set in concrete," Trusler said. "The process is quite an interactive one, and it always will be."

Be sure to click through "Bringing Prehistory to Life," a slideshow featuring photos and illustrations from "The Artist and the Scientists," published by Cambridge University Press.

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There's a certain grace to the interplay of DNA and RNA molecules ... and the scientists who study those molecules can be graceful as well. Evidence for that hypothesis is provided by the winners of this year's "Dance Your Ph.D." contest, led by Carleton University researcher Maureen McKeague. The journal Science has sponsored the contest annually since 2008 to reward efforts that transform research into interpretive dance. In this case, the reward was $1,000, and a rare chance to highlight complex chemistry with jazzy showtunes.

McKeague and her colleagues at Carleton's DeRosa Lab put together a medley to demonstrate a chemical technique known as SELEX, or systemic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment. The technique produces short segments of DNA and RNA called aptamers, in a process that mimics the natural phenomena of evolution and survival of the fittest. McKeague's mission is to find aptamers that can offer a cheap and accurate method to measure levels of the amino acid homocysteine in blood samples. High levels of homocysteine have been linked to cardiovascular disease.

Discoblog's Jennifer Welsh says the soundtrack for the dance of the molecules is "worthy of its own 'Glee' episode." I, for one, would welcome an episode in which the kids in New Directions take their inspiration from biology class. Failing that, I'd love to see a "Dance Your Ph.D." entry that incorporates tunes from "Rocky Horror Picture Show," a la "Glee." Let's take "The Quantum Mechanics of Time Travel Through Post-selected Teleportation" ... and then let's do the time warp again.

Watch videos from all four finalists in the "Dance Your Ph.D. Contest" at the ScienceNow website. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.