Posts Tagged earth

NASA’s Astounding Photo of Earth as It Hangs in Space, See the Earth as it Truly Is

This photo of the world as stitched together from NASA’s weather satellite Suomi NPP is the very definition of amazing. We can’t stress enough how much you need to follow this link to the high definition image on NASA Flickr.

Download and have a look at our world, standing alone, in the black.

Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth - Blue Marble 2012

Because we could not leave well enough alone, and perhaps this image stirred a bit of our poetic spirit, we found a website of Space Quotations devoted specifically to the big blue marble that is Earth.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves a riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

— Archibald MacLeish, American poet, ‘Riders on earth together, Brothers in eternal cold,’ front page of the New York Times, Christmas Day, 25 December 1968

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Our Strange Sky: Aurora from Atlantis

Astronaut Mike Fossum caught a beautiful photo of Aurora on July 27, 2011 from Space Shuttle Atlatnis last mission.
via @astro_aggie

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Juno Photographs Earth and the Moon from 6 Million Miles Away, Puts Life in Perspective

The Juno spacecraft took the new photo on Aug. 26 as part of a test of its camera imaging system called JunoCam. The result: a parting shot of the Earth-moon system as the probe sails on its five-year trip to Jupiter.

“This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a statement. “This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.

via Space.com

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Our Strange Sky: International Space Station Expedition 27: Soyuz launch. Up, Up and Away!

via boingboing

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Our Strange Sky: The Milky Way Band at Tenerife

In a clear sky from a dark location at the right time, a faint band of light is visible across the sky. This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the Earth. The above spectacular picture of the Milky Way arch, however, goes where the unaided eye cannot. The image is actually a deep digital fusion of nine photos that create a panorama fully 360 across. Taken recently in Teide National Park in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, the image includes the Teide volcano, visible near the image center, behind a volcanic landscape that includes many large rocks.

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The deep exposure also brings out many sky wonders normally beyond human perception

APOD has annotated the constellations over on their site. Why not have a look?

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Our Strange Sky: Fermi Space Telescope Detects Antimatter in Earth’s Thunderstorms

We won’t even attempt to translate what was read in the BBC article. Here’s a bit on the actual anti-matter find.

But within that gamma-ray data lies an even more interesting result described at the meeting by Dr McEnery and her collaborators Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama Huntsville and Joseph Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology.

“We expected to see TGFs; they had been seen by the GBM’s predecessor,” Dr McEnery explained.

“But what absolutely intrigues us is the discovery that TGFs produce not just gamma rays but also produce positrons, the antimatter equivalent to electrons.”

When gamma rays pass near the nuclei of atoms, they can turn their energy into two particles: an electron-positron pair.

Because electrons and positrons are charged, they align along the Earth’s magnetic field lines and can travel vast distances, gathered into tightly focused beams of matter and antimatter heading in opposite directions.

The dance of light and matter continues when positrons encounter electrons again; they recombine and produce a flash of light of a precise and characteristic colour.

It is this colour of light, picked up by the Fermi’s GBM, that is a giveaway that antimatter has been produced.

The magnetic field can transport the particles vast distances before this characteristic flash, and one of the Fermi detections was from a storm that was happening completely beyond the horizon.

The results will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters

Informative video below.

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Good Morning, Earth! You Look So Fine Time Lapsed at 17,239 MPH.

The Earth captured in time lapse by an astronaut at the International Space Station, cruising at 17,239 miles per hour—that’s 7.7 kilometers per second, or 4.7 miles per second.

Many thanks to Oregon State University for sharing.

Look down for more video…FROM SPACE.

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In Iceland, There is a Volcano There That Does Not Sleep

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Watch: The Earth Eclipse the Sun

Suggested musical cue when watching the above noted below:
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Wispy Strangeness on the Edge of Space

ISS astronauts witnessed a display of noctilucent or “night-shining” clouds a month or so ago. Here’s a shot of then 320km above Mongolia.

Atmospheric scientist Gary Thomas of the University of Colorado has seen thousands of noctilucent cloud (NLC) photos, and he ranks this one among the best. “It’s lovely,” he says. “And it shows just how high these clouds really are–at the very edge of space.”

He estimates the electric-blue band was 83 km above Earth’s surface, higher than 99.999% of our planet’s atmosphere. The sky at that altitude is space-black. It is the realm of meteors, high-energy auroras and decaying satellites.

What are clouds doing up there? “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” says Thomas.

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“It’s a puzzle,” says Thomas. “Noctilucent clouds have not only persisted, but also spread.” In the beginning, the clouds were confined to latitudes above 50 degrees; you had to go to places like Scandinavia, Siberia and Scotland to see them. In recent years, however, they have been sighted from mid-latitudes such as Washington, Oregon, Turkey and Iran

Science, you find so many beautiful things for me to ponder and write horror stories about.

(via science@nasa)

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