A talented group of extreme Firefox enthusiasts responsible for the Firefox mural made from cornstarch and kool-aid in addition to launching the Firefox weather balloon have now carved out a full scale Firefox Crop Circle in Oregon. “Does the sudden appearance of a Firefox crop circle imply which browser extraterrestrials prefer? We don’t know, but it was still fun to make,” the creators commented.

The 12 member crew planned out the project in less than two weeks and finished carving the crop circle itself in less than a day. The finished product with an astonishing diameter of 220 ft (67 m) was constructed in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable as seen from the sky.

The team, (mainly consisting of OSU students with way too much free time), carefully and precisely pressed down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday.

Inspired by the enthusiasm and support of Asa Dotzler at Mozilla, Matt and John, Mozilla video interns, came up with the idea a few weeks beforehand. The next thing they needed was to find a field with an owner willing to go full Firefox. Well they did, and even found a pilot willing to help them see what they were doing from above.

How did they do it?

The design took shape from several large posters that had a two color version of the Firefox logo. They then partitioned the photo into 32 distinct sections and overlaid 60 concentric circles with an even space between them. On the top of the design, the team constructed their stompers – a unique tool, consisting of some 2x4s and rope, used on the Discovery channel to quickly shape crop circles.

The circumference was made by connecting a taut measuring tape to the end of a stake and walking around in a 220 ft (67 m) circle.

Throughout the night, the team used walkie talkies to quickly report our progress to the each other.

“For example “from 2 to 4 from 74 to 86″ means we were about to stomp an area from ray number 2 to ray number 4 (somewhat analogous to going from 2 o’clock to 4 o’clock) with a depth from 74′ from the center to 86′ from the center. With two teams of stompers, each with a walkie talkie and smaller version of the map, we reported our progress to our map team located outside the circle where they recorded all the work by highlighting it on their copy of the map. The map team then knew what needed work and what had been finished even when the stomping teams couldn’t see each other,” the creators said.

After they had stomped through the larger areas boxy grid-like pattern, they simply “connected the dots” by smoothing out all the edges and blending the corners of the grid to fill everything in.

This didn’t happen without a little trouble though, “For the most part, everything went perfectly! We had a brief accident around midnight and accidentally gave our Firefox a little bump on the head, but after we saw what we had done, fixing it wasn’t very difficult,” the creators noted.

Great job guys!

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