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BlueMarble, new photos of Earth from NASA
descapa writes: "I just saw this site called BlueMarble that is brought to us by NASA. It has some new _very_ nice pics of Earth, check out the east hemisphere or the west hemisphere. Now I just need a bigger screen."
..in mpeg and mov format - worth it if you (like me) cant even see your country in the main two pics!
no sig.
It's a specular highlight. No, it's not a 100% physically accurate specular highlight, but the oceans and other water bodies have pronounced sunglint which does a good job of mucking up certain types of satellite measurements. In fact, even forests have some glint.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to make all the views I would have liked: one centered on each continent, one centered on each ocean, probably a couple for the Pacific, versions with ocean bathymetry, with and without cloud, etc. etc. etc. Sorry you got left out.
for one thing, it's an innacurate quote. for another, the data used in the blue marble is 1km per pixel resolution, which is different from what an astronaut aboard the shuttle (which itself is different from an apollo flight halfway to the moon) is capable of seeing.
f ro m.space/great_wall_from_space.html
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/great.wall.
From the journal _Science News_, December 24 & 31, 1994, volume 146, nos. 26 & 27, pages 417-448, in the article entitled *Earthmovers: Humans take their place alongside wind, water, and ice*, pp 432-433, we have, cited under fair use or whatever it is:
(begin quoted material)
Twenty-five years after his historic moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin wants to put to rest a nagging myth. For the record, Apollo astronauts could not see the Great Wall of China or other evidence of human existence from a distance of 400,000 kilometers. "That's a misconception. Journalists have fallen into that trap just to be sensationalistic," he decries.
If truth be told, Aldrin didn't spend much time peering homeward or cogitating his place in the cosmos. "The human astronaut is not able to look for the Great Wall on Earth. He's not able to philosophize on the meaning of life. He's focused on his job in front of him, which is not tripping over the television cable."
From their vantage point only a few hundred kilometers above Earth's surface, astronauts aboard the space shuttle can easily make out *Homo Sapiens'* handiwork. Urban sprawl, ribbons of roads, quilted cropland, razed patches of forest, and some national boundries show up. Yes, even the Great Wall stands out amid the Chinese countryside when the sun hits it just right.
"We do clearly see ways in which human beings are changing the surface of the planet," says shuttle asronaut Jeffrey Hoffman.
(end quoted material)
Gore pushed a program called the Digital Earth, which has subsequently collapsed under its own weight, and the arrival of President Bush. Triana, a satellite that was supposed observe the Earth from L1, has been postponed because the International Space Station has priority over shuttle flights.
The Earth Observatory started as a collaboration between a few outreach specialists (government speak for a combination of marketing and education) and our scientist bosses to make NASA Earth science more available to the public, since NASA has A LOT of very interesting data that's almost impossible to get at.