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…
Tag: Earth
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…
A Grand View
Cutting over a mile into the surrounding landscape, the Grand Canyon in Arizona is one of the most amazing places I have ever visited…and it’s no less beautiful from 200 nautical miles up! This photo was taken today by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station and immediately sent to his TwitPic page…
Darken the Lights
This Saturday, from 8:30 to 9:30pm your local time, join millions of people around the world in celebration of the 4th annual Earth Hour by turning off the lights in your home or office. It’s a message of support for our planet! It’s about individual empowerment and generating an interest and a global voice on…
Windows? Seven.
NASA’s stunning Image of the Day shows STS-130 mission astronaut Nicholas Patrick finishing up the newly-installed cupola window viewport on the ISS. Since the cupola’s successful installation last week the Space Station crew has been enjoying unprecedented views of Earth through the seven large window panes. Like visiting the Grand Canyon or looking out the…
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…
Good Morning Antarctica
Last night the Rosetta spacecraft took this stunning image of Earth, showing the rosy crescent of the southern pole lit by the summer sun. (It’s nearing the height of summer in Antarctica, when the sun never fully sets for several months.) Click for a larger view. Absolutely beautiful. I rotated the image so that south…
Lights in the Dark 