At 2:14pm EST today the space shuttle Discovery successfully docked with the International Space Station, 220 miles above Australia. This will be the last time Discovery will visit the space station, indeed the last time it will fly at all in its long and illustrious career. The image above was pulled from live video feed…
Category: Earth
A Matter of Scale
One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have virtually nothing to compare to the kinds of sizes seen in space. We look up at the stars and planets in the night sky but they are just bright points…
From the LITD Archives: Voyager’s Valentine
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
From the LITD Archives: You Are Here
Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
Haunting Beauty
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Congrats to Tor Even Mathisen for making the Astronomy Picture of the Day today with his beautiful time-lapse video of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over Tromsø, Norway! I first came across this video last week on Bad Astronomy, it’s a hauntingly beautiful presentation of the…
Window on the World
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to look out of the windows of the space station orbiting Earth at an altitude of 220 miles, watch this video! (Give it a few seconds to start up.) Expedition 25 flight engineer Scott Kelly gives us a tour of the station’s cupola, offering astronauts a…
Earthshine
It may look like a science fiction film but it’s very much science reality: a view from the window of the International Space Station, taken on November 7 by astronaut Doug Wheelock, shows external structures lit by a cool blue light reflected off our planet – “Earthshine” – while the bright crescent of dawn blooms…
Prominence Earth
A serpentine solar prominence snakes thousands of miles through space towards an unsuspecting Earth! This apocalyptic sci-fi scene is made up of two combined images of the sun from NASA’s SDO sapcecraft, acquired today September 25, 2010, superimposed and edited to show both surface (chromosphere) detail as well as coronal features, and an image of…
Life Imitates Art
Here’s a beautiful photo taken by a crew member aboard the International Space Station showing the crescent moon above Earth’s atmosphere, a hazy band of bright blue separating our world of life from the inhospitable harshness of space. An amazing shot, but what’s even cooler about it is that it looks remarkably like an illustration…
A Picture of Home
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned its cameras toward home from a distance of over 231,000 miles away on June 12, 2010. Looking back at Earth in this way helps to calibrate its Wide Angle Camera, and while doing so two images were taken with its Narrow Angle Camera and combined to create this beautiful black-and-white…
You Are Here
Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
Out of the Blue
Japan’s Akatsuki (PLANET-C) spacecraft, launched on May 20, captured this image of home as it sped away on its six-month journey to Venus. Using its ultraviolet camera Akatsuki (“Dawn” in Japanese) saw the crescent Earth as a bright electric blue from a distance of over 155,000 miles away, on May 21, 2010. Akatsuki (as well…
Lights in the Dark 