Yes, those are actual pyramids in the picture! Amazing. And by doing that, he made it very easy for me to answer the question I still get about once a month from people: "Is the Great Wall of China the only man-made object you can see from space?".
I already knew the answer is no; you can see cities easily, as well as agricultural formations, big roads, and more. But this one shot makes it very plain and simple: yes, humans have made quite an impact on the planet, and you can easily see it from space.
Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more years, be sitting at the stick of a Martian flyer?
Well, isn’t this flattering? The Times Online science blog, called Eureka Zone, picked Bad Astronomy as one of its top 30 best science blogs. It’s always nice to get some recognition, even if it doesn’t come with a wheelbarrow full of money and a free trip to Tahiti.
You listening, Times Online? Just a suggestion.
Anyway, I don’t agree with every single blog on that list — I leave it as an exercise to you to figure out which ones — but almost everything else on there is worth your time checking out. If your feed reader is looking a little pale and thin, this should help beef it up. There’s always room for science!
Hot on the heels of the post the other day about the winds on Mars blowing the sand dunes and visibly moving them across the planet’s surface comes this new satellite image of a huge sandstorm raging across the planet:
Of course, I’d forgive you if you interpret my saying "the planet" as meaning Mars. However, this picture is of Earth! Specifically, the Middle East. This March 4th image from the Terra satellite shows a plume of sand 100 km (60 miles!) across sweeping from Saudi Arabia over Kuwait and into Iran.
If this is an impact crater (it has not yet been confirmed), it’s about 40 km (25 miles) across, making it one of the largest seen on the Earth. We haven’t been hit by a big asteroid in a long time, and erosion has erased most of the impact craters. There’s a picture of the crater on that link above, and the crater is obviously very old.
It’s fascinating to know that such a large feature can be hidden at all, but it’s sad indeed on how it got uncovered. I can hope no one would be so crass as to suggest we should continue to deforest our planet in hopes of finding more treasures, but I have seen far worse things suggested to support unrestrained mining, drilling, and polluting. I’m glad something good came of this horrific practice, but all things told, I think I’d rather it had remained tucked away among thousands of square kilometers of trees.
I believe people have the right to practice their religious beliefs… up until they start to hurt others. It has been proven over and again that prayer does nothing to heal disease over the placebo effect, while vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of people. That’s math I can do pretty easily.
If this story is true, I certainly hope that the people involved are introduced to the inside of a jail cell for a long, long time. They can happily pray there all they want, and on the outside those children can get the vaccinations that will save their lives.
Helene is a dinky iceball, only about 36×32x30 km (22×19x18 miles) in size (this picture has an incredible resolution of about 113 meters (123 yards) per pixel). It circles Saturn in the same orbit as the much larger Dione, and is in fact in the larger moon’s leading Trojan point: a peculiar artifact of gravity when an object orbits another. It’s a gravitational stable point, like a valley between two mountains.
Clearly battered, Helene has an oddly smooth appearance, which may be due to the feeble gravity of the moon collecting dust also trapped in the Trojan point. At The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has more info on Helene and speculates about its appearance. She also has a good description of how the Trojan points work.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
