Here’s a view from the ISS, looking down at the brightly-lit Chicago metropolitan area on February 2, 2012. Lake Michigan is the dark expanse seen below the clouds — perhaps a dense fog bank — at bottom center. According to NASA, fog is not common in the Great Lakes area this time of the year…
Category: Earth
Apocalypse? NO. (Despite What Chevy Says)
So the buzz is buzzing about Chevy’s Super Bowl ad and its tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the aftermath from the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. Of course the message is typical — drive a Chevy truck and survive, drive anything else and perish. Which is cute and of course the production value is high, but the problem is…
Moonset Over The Atlantic
Awesomeness. No words necessary. Via the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
Hello, Earth!
It’s the 2012 version of the “Blue Marble“! Here’s an amazing new high-definition portrait of our planet, made by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite launched back on October 28. This is a composite image created from multiple scans taken with the satellite’s Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). Suomi NPP is the first satellite designed to collect…
Solar Storm in Progress!
Yesterday’s solar flare sent out a huge cloud of charged solar particles our way, and this afternoon it impacted our magnetosphere… sparking a brilliant display of aurorae in northern skies such as those above the Aurora Sky Station in Abisko, Sweden.
An Orbital View Over Africa (VIDEO)
Can’t see the video below? Click here. One of the latest uploads to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth site, this short-but-oh-so-sweet video shows the view from the Space Station as it passes over Africa, Madagascar and the southern Indian Ocean at night on December 29, 2011. Multiple lightning storms flash over Africa while…
A View From The Top
From the top of the atmosphere, that is! This gorgeous photo, taken from the Space Station on November 24, 2011, looks over our planet’s limb just after orbital sunset. We get a good look at cloud structures, the thin shell of our atmosphere (it’s always surprising how thin it really is), airglow, stars, and what…
2012 Hoaxes Debunked… by SCIENCE
It’s only January 5th and already nervous chatter about “end of the world” fears has gone into high gear… except, of course, among those who know that there’s nothing to worry about. Still, I have heard rumors of people, many young people still in school, who don’t know the real information and have heard only…
No Doom in 2012: Stop the Insanity!
Now that’s we’re officially three days into 2012, the ‘net is already abuzz with talk of impending doom on December 21 of this year. Luckily there are plenty of science sources that are more than happy to offer fact-based consolation that there is no actual evidence that anything cosmically bad is expected to occur on…
The Journey Home
A beautiful and mesmerizing series of time-lapse videos taken by astronaut Ron Garan during his last weeks aboard the International Space Station, this must-see montage is made all the sweeter by a score from Peter Gabriel and an intro from Ron himself. Ron wrote in his blog entry on FragileOasis.org: Although the International Space Station…
The World Keeps Spinnin’ Round
Just… just watch it: Wow. Now that’s an interesting view! Looking north as the ISS passed southeast over North America on the night of October 18, we get a really great perspective on our planet as a globe spinning in space! Which, of course, it is. Not to mention an awesome view of the aurora…
A Glow From Above
Many of the recent images and videos I’ve shared here have featured amazing views from the Space Station. At 250 miles up, astronauts aboard the ISS enjoy an unprecedented and privileged view of our world. In addition to having a vantage point from which to view the countries, continents and oceans below, they also get…
Lights in the Dark 