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Stunning Time Lapse of the Earth From the ISS
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."
seeing bolts of lightning from space was awfully sublime
Lightning looks really impressive from up there. Shame its not as good down here.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
These things always help putting the world and its issues into perspective.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
So that's what those rich people pay for...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I thought they weren't going to fly over Compton/Los Angeles anymore at nighttime after the Soyuz-jackings last year?
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.
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.
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!
FRA: STFU GTFO
Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
Always a good perspective check
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
What i found most interesting was all the thunderstorms aligned over large distances.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
you can see the thin line of pollution that we create that circles the earth. No wonder the earth is melting away with the global warming. I'll be surprised if the earth is viable for my grand kids.
Remember, the earth is revolving while the ISS is orbiting, so it will be very confusing to try to figure it out by watching that video. It's not like the earth is standing still while the ISS orbits.
For the first time, I wondered why we can't mod stories up.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Executive summary
Some of us have jobs to do you know.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
A couple years ago, My frat bros rented a zero-gravity plane. Some of them took girlfriends/fuck buddies up for some gravity free pussy. That didn't work out, but one did get a zero-gravity hummer :). I bet a 69 would be less awkward than on Earth.
I jacked off and shot a pretty impressive roper, if I do say so myself.
Needless to say, we were banned.
We videotaped it, though. If I can find a copy, I'll upload it.
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).
there should be live streaming of the planet done constantly by many satellites at different latitudes/longitudes, resolutions, frequencies, all sorts of options.
You can't handle the truth.
Man, reality has low FPS.
E pluribus unum
Out of all the dozens of ideas I've had that others realized and made millions, this is certainly the one I'm glad someone else also thought of.
Just this week I was thinking about ways to get a tiny probe into space whose only purpose would be photography. NASA (understandably) doesn't waste too much of their tiny bandwidth (and mission time) to transfer large photos; but what if that was the mission's only purpose?
We could create a timelapse of all of Humanity making their rounds around the Sun. We could take a shot of Earth setting above the thin atmosphere of Mars.
We could park it in geostationary orbit around Europa and make a timelapse of it circling around Jupiter, perhaps even witnessing the expansion and compression it experiences in doing so... the possibilities are endless.
If only I could convince Canon or Nikon to sponsor the century's publicity stunt.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
What's the green light seen on sec. 30?
It takes 90 minutes to orbit the earth at the ISS' altitude. The earth only rotates 22.5 degrees out of 360 degrees. That's 6.5% of one full rotation. The earth is basically standing still as far as the space station is concerned over one orbit.
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 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.
The space station would have a great advantage over a 0G plane. You get the time to be creative. However, there will be a few issues with Newton's Laws.
However, the ISS orbits once every 1.5 hours, so the Earth's revolution would be pretty insignificant in this video (which looks like about half an orbit). Still very confusing, since the ISS is in a LEO making the overall patterns difficult to see. That and the cloud cover obscuring lots of details. My best guess agrees with the OP, it seems to be going from somewhere near the arctic along the west coast of the US (you can make out the coast of California pretty clearly, and see Central America) and what I'm pretty sure is the length of Chile down at the bottom. It isn't completely polar. Orbital dynamics, however, are pretty complex.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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 Amazon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ
Would you believe some twit has already plagiarized it, and even kept the same YouTube title?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInCjvBy-Uw
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.
I can see my house!
This page 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.
I watched the ground (stupendous,) I watched the lightning (amazing,) I watched the stars (Fascinating: it's worth watching them come upwards from the horizon - like rain in reverse, and also watch the atmospheric effects on them.) Then I tried to figure out where places are (still clueless: would like second-by-second tabulated list of locations, please.) 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.
Just asking, as always.
Graham.
(SETI user of the day 19 September 2011 - Every Little Helps!)
This sequence was taken at night using moonshine for illumination. Which makes it pretty damn cool.
No sooner do I get over one, then you put a better one right next to me. Bastards.
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
I already beat you to it-- get a commercial (or better yet, freeware) screencap software like CamStudio or SnapzPro, set the rezolution to 1080 on the YouTube toolbar, and record it playing. Then do all your cropping, resizing, exporting in your video editing software of choice.
It took me five minutes.
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.
which is totally what she said
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.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Or you could, you know, just pull the FLV out of your browser cache and import that into your video editing software of choice.
Why are we oohing and ahhing over the Civilization 4 title screen?
You can see the thundering on the surface of the planet.
Thanks for sharing.
I used savetube to download the video, and it offered the regular options: various formats and resolutions. Only it had this:
Download MP4(3072p (Original))
From wikipedia:
Sucks to be you dude.
Licking windows much?
Funny, I interpreted the GP as meaning "this is truly stunning, unlike most of the stuff labelled as stunning".
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.
which is totally what she said
As the world is flat, this is clearly impossible, and must be propaganda made up by Marxists or other atheists.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Am I the only one who imagined the theme to Blakes 7 while watching this?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
From wikipedia:
Sucks to be you dude.
I think someone coming for 25 seconds is quite impressive.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Wonder what he used. I know if I were going up to the space station it would take me a while to decide on what lenses to bring.
I can't hear anything!