Via Wil’s tweet I learned of a set of online images of Earth taken from space, and… well. Wow. They’re incredible.
The thunderhead over the US midwest is spectacular, and humbling, and for some reason it bothers me. Maybe it’s similarity to a mushroom cloud? Maybe.
The picture of a cloud over China made me think of how lonely it must be to silently circle the Earth, looking straight down over landscape you can see but cannot touch, and maybe, at the time you look, not even know the location.
But my favorite is the last one. I spent some time last year looking for a really good shot of the Moon near the Earth’s limb from space to demonstrate the distortion caused by our air, but this one is phenomenal. Best I’ve ever seen!
June 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Awesome! I actually have one of those pics on my background at the moment. The Cumulonimbus Cloud pics are definitely my favorite, beautiful from the ground and sky.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
The moonset over the Carribean reminds of a scene were Buzz Aldrin is setting on top of Gemini looking towards the moon in From the to the Moon.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Absolutely amazing stuff! The image of Aurora Australis is the sharpest (least smeared) I’ve yet seen. Plus the sunset glow, city lights and lightning are outstanding!
June 10th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Incredibly beautiful stuff. I think I know why that midwest picture disconcerts you: that towering cloud is clearly God, white beard, white robe, and everything. I just don’t understand why his beard sticks out horizontally like that.
As a bonus, because of my imagination that same picture also looks like one of those old paintings with angels running around everywhere doing things.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
My favorite is the von Karman vortices being shed in the wake of the island. Hooray for turbulent flow. It appears to me that the pattern in the clouds matches that in the ocean. I’m curious which is inducing the pattern in which. From what I’ve found on Google, it’s typically described as an atmospheric effect, so I guess it’s the wind locally changing the appearance of the water surface. Great pics.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Awesome, awesome pics! I friend and I had decided that we wouldn’t want to go into space until artificial gravity is invented due to motion sickness and bathroom issues but this may make us change our minds…
Oh, at first I misread “Buzz Lightyear” and thought that Buzz Aldrin was doing something that no one had told me about. That would have been cool, and really not something that I would put past a guy that awesomely (is that a word?) cool, even at his age.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
The moonset picture is my favorite. All these are beautiful pictures. Have to set these up as wallpaper on my computer. They actually make me feel like I was looking down from the camera’s position.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Thank you for the links, Phil! I just wish I had more computers, so I could use each image as a desktop wallpaper.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Very nice. Now I know why it ain’t all bad to have one’s head up in the clouds.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Very nice! Quite a view from up there.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
awesome images, I never get tired of seeing earth from space.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
darnit! That moon image is too small! No way I can make a wallpaper out of this!
June 10th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Woah… those are absolutely incredible shots!
June 10th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Simply stunning! The distorted moon is amazing. But taken from space? Hmmmm….Isn’t that a jet streaking across the image slightly above the moons limb?
June 10th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
The Shuttle and weather pics are, indeed, amazing. I’m using several of them in my desktop image line up.
But I wanted to point out that the entirety of The Globe’s Big Picture feature (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/) is quite possibly the best representation of the photo essay format I’ve ever seen on the web.
Hope you also saw the Cassini set: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/05/cassini_nears_fouryear_mark.html
June 10th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
We live on the most beautiful planet in the solar system. Sometimes with all the astonishing pics we are able to get of other exotic places in the universe I think we forget that. It’s nice here
June 11th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Very nice pictures indeed, but the one with the text: “Lightning flashes, city lights, sunset, Aurora Australis, atmospheric glow and some stars, seen over Argentina on 4/23/2003″ looks like a picture that have been lying around in a bottom drawer for ten years or so. The “stars” on that photo is all over the place even on earth and the spacecraft itself.
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/shuttle_06_08/12.jpg
June 11th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Thank you very much.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Wow. Waycool.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:17 am
The source of all these images (except the launch photos) is The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of the Earth:
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/
The full-resolution copy of the moon is located here:
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=ISS010&roll=E&frame=18592
And here are a few similar collections (published by NASA (where I work)):
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/CitiesAtNight/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/EdLu/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/ISSAurora/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/AstronautPhotography/
June 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
[...] found this awesome post about photography from space through Bad Astronomy, who got it from Whil Wheaton. Go us. Now I get to blog about [...]
June 14th, 2008 at 3:33 am
Wow, moon set over the Caribbean, spectacular! The atmospheric glow is also beautiful. There are so many exceptional pictures of space or from space looking down on Earth in NASA’s huge collection of pictures.