Stunning Time Lapse of the Earth From the ISS 180
The Bad Astronomer writes "Science educator James Drake took 600 still photos from the International Space Station as it orbited the Earth, and created a fantastic time-lapse animation out of them. It must be seen to be appreciated; storms and cities fly past below in amazing clarity."
the video was spectacular (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the video was spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)
I was amazed at just how much lightning was in that video. It never occurred to me until now that there would be so many thunderstorms going on all over the world all of the time. This is a rare video where the superlatives in the headline (amazing, fantastic etc.) are well and truly justified.
Re:the video was spectacular (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] there are 44 +/- 5 lightning bolts per second on the Earth.
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Indeed, and most of the lightning doesn't even come down and contact the Earth; most lightning, and the biggest lightning, jumps between clouds, as shown in the video.
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According to the description from the Youtube video its Earth's ionoshpere.
"Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy."
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From TFV:
A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy. Raw data was downloaded from;
The Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth
"http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/mrf.htm ".
Virtualdub was used to create the final movie.
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Re:the video was spectacular (Score:4, Informative)
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Also checkout the atmospheric lensing of the stars in the background.
I thought that was Airglow [wikipedia.org]
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It's different. Watch the stars as they pass through the atmospheric layer. They're brighter within it, thanks to atmospheric lensing. Some aren't even visible after they pass above the yellow arc.
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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Australis_From_ISS.JPG [wikimedia.org]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Borealis.jpg [wikimedia.org]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Borealis_from_Expedition_6.ogg [wikimedia.org]
Also, I won't complain if the next attempt would be less jerky... if not by longer exposures (which would introduce some motion blur, but probably also make lightning less visible), then at least by capturing photos m
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This is so beautiful, it hurts.
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Direct youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ [youtube.com]
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The HD version is awesome. More FPS and longer would be appreciated! :-)
In the 90s there was a great late night program on German TV called "Space Night / Earth Views". While obviously only SD, those were mesmerizing films with perfect ambient/chill background music. Examples (headphones recommended):
Earth Views 6 Intro [youtube.com]
Earth Views 4 Excerpt [youtube.com]
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In the 90s there was a great late night program on German TV called "Space Night / Earth Views". While obviously only SD, those were mesmerizing films with perfect ambient/chill background music.
It's again on every night on both "Bayerisches Fernsehen" and "BR-alpha".
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The US should run NASA videos and slideshows of space imagery all the time, seeding news and talk shows with them as "news events". We'd get a lot more people appreciating the truly elevating work we spend so relatively little to get from NASA. In fact NASA should probably get a half-billion bucks a year just to mail a DVD to every American household at Christmastime.
Instead all we get is the terminally boring NASA TV channel, and only on some cable systems (Cox in New Orleans, but not any in the NYC area).
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There's a video response where the guy has edited it to look smoother and clearer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdDEpC0uHWI&feature=watch_response [youtube.com]
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Did anybody recognize over which area the ISS flew in the video?
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Look in the YouTube description, it's there... it started over the Pacific Ocean, around 0:11 I think you can see SF and LA, and it continued to Central and South America, ending with the sunrise around Antarctica.
Awesome Lightning (Score:2)
Lightning looks really impressive from up there. Shame its not as good down here.
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? i've seen some amazing lightning storms that give you the "wow" factor every bit as much as this footage. perhaps you don't live in a particularly stormy area?
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Priceless (Score:2)
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You mean every American taxpayer? We're hardly all rich. Only the tiniest percentage of us are. And they don't pay taxes.
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Partially agreeing with the grandparent post, I'd agree that particular view would be worth seeing for about $20-$40 million, assuming I had that kind of money. It would be especially worth watching from the Cupola of the ISS or something similar. That several wealthy people have paid that sort of price for the privilege, I'd have to say that particular view of the Earth is precisely what those folks are paying that kind of money to see.
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Well, they're paying to feel the view.
The rest of us are paying to just see it. And paying most of the cost for the rich people to hitch a ride.
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Actually they pay a lot less, percentage-wise. Which is what matters.
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The American people paid most of what those pics from the ISS cost. That's where I got the idea: from the reality of who paid for that.
But it does appear they might have been talking about space tourism. Which is also mostly paid for by the American people.
So while that post might have been talking (unclearly) about space tourists, it implies that rich people are paying for what the American people are paying for. Which is indeed more interesting to me than what rich people get for their ticket price.
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Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Also your signature is incorrect... edlin is loosely based on Unix ed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)#Features [wikipedia.org]
A more accurate statement would be "Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us VMS" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#VMS [wikipedia.org] )
Interesting (Score:2, Funny)
I thought they weren't going to fly over Compton/Los Angeles anymore at nighttime after the Soyuz-jackings last year?
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I'm not sure how it is possible, but I think I just heard the ISS whoooshing by.
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In short, Compton ( a neighborhood in Los Angeles) is often associated with high levels of street crime-- in particular car-jacking/stealing. Hence, the "soyuz-jacking" reference.
You know what would be cool? (Score:5, Funny)
If we got everyone to shut of their lights and not answer radio calls from ISS for a day. Just to mess with their heads!
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I think It would have to be pre-planned waaaaaaaaaay in advance.
I wonder what would happen at power plants if everyone removed power from any outdoor photon emitting device a at the same time?
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Sadly, and I say sadly because I am love to admit I've watched this movie, it sounds much like the book that John Cusack's character wrote in that horrible movie 2012.
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The Magrethea answering machine would be appropriate, especially on the second call.
Fitting (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M [youtube.com]
Always a good perspective check
I don't have time to watch all that... (Score:4, Funny)
Executive summary [hoover.net.au]
Some of us have jobs to do you know.
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Light pollution (Score:2)
What i found most interesting was all the thunderstorms aligned over large distances.
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There are many places even in the USA where the night is pitch black and you can see the Milky Way with zero light pollution. It's much easier to go the NE New Mexico than into orbit.
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While traveling through NM this summer at night, I made a point to stop in the middle of nowhere and turn off all of my lights. The view was amazing and you could clearly and easily see the Milky Way. It was actually kind of spooky with how pitch black it was out in the middle of nowhere. The mind starts playing tricks on you quite quickly... :)
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You've never been camping, have you?
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It's a little sad to see all that light pollution. I wonder my children eill ever be able to see the milky way... without having to pay for a space trip.
As others mentioned, there are plenty of places you can go that still offer a pristine view of the night sky. Light pollution drops off pretty rapidly as you get away from the source.
This summer we had a mini family reunion at my uncle's cabin in southwest Montana. Possibly the best part for me was getting away from the city and seeing the night sky the way it is truly meant to be seen. The sheer number of stars and their brightness is mind-boggling and yet so easily lost and forgotten in even a smaller
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Light pollution? so light is bad now? someone tell the sun...
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How about we get affordable space trips and reduce our light pollution? For starters, we can stop pointing so many lights up.
It deserves the hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
constant streaming (Score:2)
there should be live streaming of the planet done constantly by many satellites at different latitudes/longitudes, resolutions, frequencies, all sorts of options.
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Low FPS (Score:2)
Man, reality has low FPS.
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Double-wow!
Green city? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the green light seen on sec. 30?
Re:Green city? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Veracruz is not on that side of Mexico (the Gulf is on the left side on this video).
That would be, if still in Mexico, more like Oaxaca or even Chiapas. If indeed its even more to the south, then Guatemala.
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I compared the video to Google Earth, with the viewpoint set at a similar altitude and angle.
I'm pretty sure it's Guatemala City.
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No... Clearly, the Borg have landed and have begun to assimilate us...
I, for one, welcome our blah blah blah...
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Plagiarism already (Score:2)
Would you believe some twit has already plagiarized it, and even kept the same YouTube title?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInCjvBy-Uw [youtube.com]
I've never felt a need to "report" YouTube videos before, but there doesn't even seem to be a public mechanism to do it.
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Report it for what? NASA videos are not copyrighted.
And even if they were, Youtube only lets you report copyright violations if you're the copyright holder. As it should.
Obligatory . . . (Score:5, Funny)
These were in the dark (Score:2)
I don't get it. (Score:2)
Why are we oohing and ahhing over the Civilization 4 title screen?
obvious fake (Score:2)
Mental musical accompanyment (Score:2)
Am I the only one who imagined the theme to Blakes 7 while watching this?
The ISS isn't in polar orbit is it? (Score:2)
In fact, I looked it up, Wikipedia has the ISS in a 53 degree inclination orbit. I can't make heads-or-tails of what I'm seeing in the video either.
It certainly isn't going pole-to-pole, though.
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It says right in the YouTube description, though yeah I guessed correctly where it was as it passed Mexico, that little sliver of land between North and South America is fairly recognisable even when it's "upside down" :p
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I think AC if right about tracking down the west coast of the Americas. It looks like the first big city you see is probably Vancouver, BC, Canada, then the Puget Sound region, on to Portland. I live in Oregon and the placement of the cities south of Portland look just right to me. If you look at a globe the 53 degree inclination is about right to track down the coast. Here [nasa.gov] is a page that shows the ISS track.
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I think that's Guatemala City.
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I agree it looks like it's flying over the western side of the Americas at first, but I think it must then turn towards the east. You would never see the sun rising over Antarctica, and all of the satellite path maps always look like wavy lines against the Mercator projection, so it would make sense for the ISS to turn east as it approaches the southern tip of South America.
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At 18 seconds in they play east of the Gulf of California over central mexico.
31 seconds Veracruz
35 seconds, Panama appears on left edge
Re:Direction (Score:5, Informative)
This page [nasa.gov] shows the orbit of the ISS. I believe what we're seeing is:
0:00 - Seattle / Vancouver as a dot on the horizon at left.
0:05 - Left to right: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco.
0:12 - ISS passes over land slightly north of San Francisco, moving toward Las Vegas; Los Angeles and San Diego on the right.
0:16 - ISS passes almost directly over Las Vegas (bottom center).
0:18 - ISS passes almost directly over Phoenix. Gulf of California on the right; Dallas and Houston on the horizon at far left.
0:28 - Mexico City. Gulf of Mexico on the left, Pacific Ocean on the right.
0:34 - Central American coast flyby, complete with tropical storms.
0:43 - South American coast flyby: Colombia, then Ecuador, then Peru.
0:51 - Lima, Peru.
0:55 - Border between Peru and Chile. The station's orbit begins to curve inland (eastward).
0:58 - Valparaiso and Santiago on the horizon at right (behind the solar panels after 0:59).
0:59 - Buenos Aires, Argentina is just appearing on the horizon (top center) as the video ends.
So I don't think Antarctica is ever visible - the station's orbit starts to turn eastward before that happens.
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Agreed. I just disagree on the Antarctica bit: in my opinion the video ends when the ISS start to "turn" into South America. The blackout region to the left, near the end of the video, seems to be the Amazon forest. As a matter of fact, the ISS is in this same path right now (2011-09-18 20:22 UTC).
Re:Direction (Score:5, Informative)
This is awesome! I'm trying to figure out what part of the earth this is imaging. My best guess is going from the north to south pole along the western side of the Americas, starting somewhere near Vancouver/Seattle passing Mexico, down along Chile, and ending as it gets to Antarctica. Can anyone confirm this?
The description on YouTube [youtube.com] says:
A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
Funny how (Score:2)
As someone studying the financial crisis that's ongoing and all the finger pointing and trying to figure out who owes who and can't pay -- all by country boundaries, this puts a better perspective on how artificial all that is.
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From the youtube video description:
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the A
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For example: http://classic.wunderground.com/tropical/ [wunderground.com] and scroll down to the latest atlantic still photograph. If you wait too long, BTW, you'll get infrared by default -- you only get clouds per se during daylight so that you can see them.
Or then, there are the many military satellites that can take amazingly high resolution pictures of the surface almost anywhere, to the
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NASA already has many satellites in orbit that take pictures. Its not live streaming, but you can easily download the data and look at it for yourself. Their cameras aren't just restricted to the visible spectrum (in fact, that is probably a minority), but the cloud tracking projects definitely have visible data from a polar orbiter. The Terra satellite (i think its that one) takes something like 9 pictures along its orbit at different angles to the earth so that cloud height and motion can be determined
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http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/ [nasa.gov]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/index.html [nasa.gov]
Those are just two missions that come to mind.
For your proposal, I think you underestimate the complexity and equipment needed to launch a probe and have it captured into a geostationary orbit (you want to "match speed") of a moon of another planet. Also note that geostationary orbits are very high altitude orbits over the equator. For decent pictures you need to do what the ISS is doing and use a lower
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Don't forget to check out their interactive mapping service [nasa.gov] while there.
And a link [nasa.gov] for all their services.
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I live in L.A, so my experience of pollution is that it's brown, not a pretty green/yellow color.
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I'm not an expert and I don't know if what's seen in the video is all pollution, but different chemical and particulate pollutants inhabit (for lack of a better word) different altitudes. The brown haze you see in LA probably mostly soot from vehicles, power plants, and other things burning somewhere or other chemicals that filter the sunlight. From the page on smog [wikipedia.org]:
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It took me five minutes.
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Did you actually watch the video? Even if you weren't literally stunned, you have to admit those lightning storms must be slightly more stunning than your typical tazer.
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It would be kind of silly to post a single word comment where the word is the first word of the summary's title. That's YouTube style commenting.
Besides, if you look at all his other comments, they're flamebait/trolls all the way. Quite likely that he's just being grouchy, rather than actually being positive.
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Possibly pointing the panels towards the moon to collect the reflected light?
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Then I tried to figure out where places are (still clueless: would like second-by-second tabulated list of locations, please.)
It's right there in the description of YouTube video if you expand it.
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Then I started watching the ISS itself - the play of light and reflections on the equipment that is visible, and have to ask (someone knowledgeable, please) if the motions of the solar panels while in earth shadow are really necessary? It just seems uneconomical electrically and mechanically to allow such movements.
They keep moving because it's the easiest to thing to do. They need to re-position the panels so they're face-on to the sun as it rises on the next orbit. The simplest thing to do is just to continually track the sun, even if the earth is in the way; that way it's just one slow, continuous motion. That said, they can also go into "night flyer" mode where the station turns the panels edge-on to the direction of travel to reduce drag, when in the dark. The tradeoff is this puts more strain on the control-
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Licking windows much?
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From wikipedia:
Sucks to be you dude.
I think someone coming for 25 seconds is quite impressive.
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with all the hurt and pain in the world it's stuff like this that truly make it all worth it... the lights, the lightning, the earth. thank you
Fuck me you're a cheap date.