A Russian actress and director were launched into space this week, headed for the International Space Station (ISS) to shoot scenes for the very first feature film to be made in orbit.
When it comes to natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, not even standard aerial photography can really cut it. To capture something that occurs on such a massive scale, you need a massive view, and so these disasters are often best visualized by NASA's satellites.
Taken by a collection of three satellites orbiting Earth -- Landsat 7, ASTER, and MODIS -- the images above and below are part of an incredible collection of photos that were captured from space purely for their aesthetic beauty, rather than the usual scientific reasoning.
In September and October of 1994, the space shuttle Endeavour was orbiting 115 nautical miles above Earth while the Kliuchevskoi Volcano was spewing ash and dust into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Not in any position to do anything about it, the astronauts aboard the space shuttle did the only thing they could do... they took pictures.
If it ever was a secret, it sure isn't anymore: we LOVE photos from space. And judging by the response we typically get to sharing them, so do you, which is why we were so excited when we stumbled across these magnificent images of lightning NASA released just a couple of days ago.
Today is the spring equinox -- one of the two days during the year when night is almost exactly equal to day -- and in good ol' fashioned APOD style, the folks at NASA are helping us understand and visualize this phenomenon by zooming out... waaaaay out.