Photographs of storm systems as seen from airplanes or satellites aren’t too uncommon these days, but have you ever seen one that looks like this? Probably not, because this photograph is out of this world — literally. It’s titled “The Rose,” and shows the spinning vortex of a gigantic hurricane on the surface of Saturn.
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You’ve probably heard of The Blue Marble, an iconic photo of Earth captured in 1972 from 28,000 miles away by astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft. Well, NASA has just released a number of photographs titled “Black Marble.” They offer the same perspective as the iconic photo, except these new images show what our planet looks like at night!
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An apparent meteor struck Jupiter yesterday, creating an explosion so massive that amateur astronomers looking through their telescopes her on Earth were able to see it. Amateur astrophotographer George Hall of Dallas, Texas happened to have a camera and telescope pointed at the planet at the time, and managed to snag some video footage of the fireball, which he soon uploaded to his Flickr account.
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Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Landsat, the longest-running program focused on acquiring satellite photos of Earth. The Landsat satellite snaps one completely photo of the Earth’s surface every 16 days, and the petabytes of photos collected over the years have given scientists a view into how our planet’s surface has changed over time, whether by natural or human-caused means. Google is currently working to make the photos easily enjoyable by the general public by transforming them into time-lapse videos.
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18-year-old photography enthusiast Tomislav Safundžić of Croatia gathered some NASA imagery captured from the International Space Station and created this beautiful time-lapse view of Earth. It’s titled “This is Our Planet”.
(via Doobybrain)
After NASA published its latest jaw-dropping “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth last month, many of you wondered how “real” the image was. Here’s NASA’s explanation on how their images are created:
The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere ‘Blue Marble’ is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometers). NASA scientist Norman Kuring managed to ‘step back’ from Earth to get the big picture by combining data from six different orbits of the Suomi NPP satellite. Or putting it a different way, the satellite flew above this area of Earth six times over an eight hour time period. Norman took those six sets of data and combined them into one image.
So rather than being a composite of multiple images captured from the same perspective, they do in fact map images captured by the satellite onto a 3D sphere.
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NASA has released another Blue Marble photograph of Earth. It calls this one the “most amazing, highest resolution image of Earth ever”. The image is a composite created from a number of photos of Earth’s surface captured on January 4, 2012, and weighs in at a massive 64-megapixels (8000×8000). You can download the full-res version here. Be warned though — it might crash your browser.
Creating tiny planets by projecting panoramic photographs onto a sphere is something you’ve probably seen before, but Dutch photographer Wouter van Buuren creates his planets a bit differently. rather than shoot panoramas from the ground, van Buuren climbs to the top of towers, cranes, skyscrapers, and bridges and points his camera in every direction below. He then takes the resulting photographs and arranges them into compact worlds.
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Street View Stereographic is a fun little web app that creates a “little planet” (i.e. stereographic projection) using the photos from any Google Street View location you provide it.
Street View Stereographic [Github]
Between August and October of this year, the crew onboard the International Space Station used a Nikon D3S (at high ISOs) to capture photographs of Earth as they zipped around it at 17,000mph. Michael Konig then took the footage and compiled it into this eye-popping time-lapse video showing what our planet looks like from up there.
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