This should give you a “spiritual” experience: it’s a wonderful one-minute, time-lapse video of what you’d see of Earth from the International Space Station. The YouTube site describes it thusly:
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 earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
h/t: Matthew Cobb via Roger Highfield
Fascinating! I could play this over and over!
Lots of lightening too, which is interesting to see from above 😉
What a marvelous start to the day … thank you !!
Still with the image of that market with the stuffed, roast pig in Bogota, it would be fun to see a little arrow pop up to show when it passes by.
And what’s the green patch at 0:31?
Using the description and Google Maps I get that to be Ciudad de Mexico, that seems to have acquired some distinct light setting. Probably filtering through its polluted atmosphere.
What a large sprawl!
Mexico City is the huge bright area in the centre at 0:28. The greenish area seems to be a large area of Guatemala, I think, although Guatemala city itself is the more normal yellow/orange colour.
Beautiful! What’s the latest on attempts to re-provision the ISS?
A few days old, but the faulty gas generator of the third stage was deemed a manufacturing error.
To check for manufacturing quality, they have two similar stages on launches that they may want to get up before trying the manned version. They have also now finally started to find pieces of the wreck to look at the debris clues instead of all telemetry data.
If all that goes to plan, the current period of short personnel (3 ISS-tronauts) will be only slightly longer than originally planned.
The airglow layer (the greenish feature at about 80 km altitude) being called the ionosphere is misleading. It’s an ionospheric feature but the ionosphere is not a thin shell, it extends from 60 to more than 1000 km altitude.
As long as we are nitpicking the misleads, chemistries of airglow, even the visible one, is not part of the ionosphere (ionized atmosphere) but mainly the thermosphere (chemically differentiated atmosphere), mesosphere and )stratosphere (thermally differentiated atmosphere). Visible airglow is just a convenient marker.
Speaking of airglow and ISS videos, here is a must see of aurora from ISS (this time a NASA video, not an amateur – but still good!), and how it relates to the airglow layer.
Makes me fly.
But I was more elated by these things before I saw that image of the new visible political border visible from space (besides the Great Wall structures), the India-Pakistan floodlit border.
Unfortunately the “spiritual” experience of the religious is a fantasy, and is ill suited to connect with real uplifting experiences.
I know the description is from You Tube, but that’s Colombia, not Columbia.
Can anyone identify any points on the Earth below? I tried but didn’t recognize anything. If you can, please note the place and the time on the video that it’s in the picture.
(I meant any “other” points.)
Stanley Kubrick was here …
@Dr. I. Needtob Athe…
The ISS is ‘flying’ South along the West coast of the Americas from latitude 60N to latitude 40S. This is perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of an orbit & it would have taken the ISS 30mins to move that distance. The 600 photographs used to stitch this ‘movie’ together are showing the ISS travelling at around 480,000 mph. Every second in the ‘movie’ the camera has travelled around 135 miles
If you see any yellow blobs at the horizon it’s important to allow for considerable foreshortening & realise that such a blob is a ‘supercity’ ~ most maps are poor at showing how communities have fused into an organism ~ thus Sacramento – San Fran – San Jose – LA – San Diego – Tijuana should be thought of as one creature !
** 0:07 We are over the Pacific looking SSE. The blob on the horizon at the top is the start of the above ‘supercity’. The string of lights that point towards that ‘supercity’ are Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle & Portland
** 0:14 Bottom of screen from the centre to the right is Reno, The Sierra Nevada Range (the dark strip going up the screen), Sacramento, SF & the cloudy Pacific. The string of lights going up the screen from Sacramento are all the communities in the San Joaquin Valley. That string of lights are aiming at LA
** 0:17 The ‘flame’ shooting up from the bottom right is LA & San Diego. To the left of that in the middle is Las Vegas & above LV is Phoenix
** 0:19 Phoenix with the entire Gulf of California to the right going up the screen (the whale’s vagina)
** 0:29 Mexico City
** 0:34 Guatemala City in the bottom left
** 0:37 San José
** 0:46 Ecuador
** 0:50 The Andes range down the middle. Peru to the left & the Pacific to the right
** 0:56 Bottom left is Lake Titicaca. The dark blue to the left is land & the cloud to the right is over the Pacific
** 0:59 Bam! Sunrise
It’s awesome until the depressing moment at the end when it crashes into the Sun.
Oops, sorry for spoiling.
Wow!! I was struck by all the lightning strikes. They were everywhere. I had heard estimates of the number but this made it very real.
Well done – what a treat.
Sob, the other really noticeable thing was the amount of energy being consumed – especially in Europe – in city lights burning (I can’t help but think, unnecessarily).
But, I love Earth, I really love Earth:-)
Well, I thought it was Europe but from the comments above it wasn’t. So that makes it even m,ore worrying. Add Europe to the city lights displayed in this video and it is magnitudes of ‘worse’. So still, sob.