Recently, a picture of the New England area of the US photographed by astronauts on the ISS made the rounds. It was lovely, and inspired Rémi Boucher and Guillaume Poulin, two scientific communicators at an astronomy center in southern Quebec called the ASTROLab, to see if more pictures were taken. At The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth they found hundreds of photos taken from that pass, so they put them together into a wonderful time lapse video of the journey:

The video starts as the space station is over the Gulf of Mexico. The path of the station took it just east of the US coastline, and this view looks generally to the northwest. You can see Florida clearly, as well as Atlanta (surprisingly far to the west), the gigantic DC-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York City corridor, then New England. Cape Cod is such an obvious landmark! Finally we can see southeastern Canada, and the Atlantic ocean.

I love how the northern lights are subtle, just hinted at, during much of the video since they are seen from such a great distance and edge-on, only to get brighter and stronger with proximity.

One thing that’s a bit puzzling: what are the lights seen in the Gulf of Mexico at the beginning of the video? My first guess would be oil rigs — there are quite a few of them. If anyone knows for sure, leave a comment!

I’ll note that this video felt much smoother to me than others of its kind. It’s displayed at 30 frames per second, but slowed down to half speed on top of that, which is probably what helps give it such a smooth, velvety feel. The entire elapsed amount of real time is only about 10 minutes — which is a powerful reminder of just how fast 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec) really is.

Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth."; Rémi Boucher – Guillaume Poulin / ASTROLab du parc national du Mont-Mégantic

Today in America is our most revered holiday: the Superbowl. I am not particularly invested in either team — I had to look up who’s playing, to be honest — but there is something about the game I like: science! Yes, science, of which there is plenty to be had during any sporting event. You just have to look for it.

Last year, during the big game, I tweeted a series of science facts relating to football, and, when the game was over, collected them into a blog post.

I thought it would be fun do it again — this time, I’ll use the hashtag #Sciperbowl — but this year, instead of waiting to collect them, I’ll simply update this post as I add them. That way you don’t have to wait until the end of the game to see them all.

So sit back on your recliner, keep one hand in a bag of chips and another on the refresh button. Let’s see how to really enjoy this game! I’ll start the tweets and start updating this post at the start of the game.

First Quarter

1) Realistically, a football is not a ball. It’s more of a prolate spheroid.

2) Football pads work by absorbing impact as well as spreading it out over a larger area.

3) Pads lower the force of impact by lengthening the time of the collision.

4) Pressure = Force/Area, so increasing the area of the impact reduces pressure and therefore injury.

5) Every time a football is thrown, it’s briefly in orbit… but the Earth gets in the way.

Second Quarter

NOTE: The following info uses air (not ground) speed and neglects air resistance. [Note: the math on these next ones can be found online, for example at the CSU San Bernadino website.]

6) To be thrown 100 yards, a football should leave the quarterback’s hand at a 45 degree angle at 70 mph.

7) The ground speed of that throw is about 50 mph.

8) A ball thrown like that will reach a max height of about 80 feet.

9) A 100 yard throw like that will take about 4.5 seconds to go up and come back down.

Halftime

10) Halftime for the Universe was 6.86 billion years ago (+/- .12 billion).

Third Quarter

11) Because the Moon has 1/6 the Earth’s gravity, lunar football would be pretty different.

12) On the Moon, a football thrown at 70 mph would go 600 yards, take 27 seconds, and reach 500 feet high.

13) Throw a lunar football at 28 mph to get it 100 yards downfield. It’ll take 11 seconds & get 80 feet high.

14) All those throws assumed a 45 degree angle. At higher and lower angles, the ball must be thrown faster.

15) Want the ball to go into Earth orbit? You’ll have to throw it at 5 miles per second.

16) In a black hole, it doesn’t matter how hard you throw the ball. It’s not getting out.

Fourth Quarter

17) During a 4 hour game, the Earth rotates 60 degrees.

18) During a 4 hour game, the Earth spins a total of 3200 miles at the latitude of Indianapolis.

19) During a 4 hour game, the Moon travels over 9000 miles around the Earth.

20) During a 4 hour game, the New Horizons Pluto probe travels 130,000 miles farther from the Sun.

21) Since the starting whistle, the Sun’s moved 2 million miles in its orbit around the center of the galaxy.

That’s it! And congrats to whichever team won!

Football picture from Elvert Barnes’ Flick photostream.

Wanna get Scott Sigler’s brand-spankin’ new novel The MVP for three bucks off? Read on…

Scott is a pal of mine, but he’s also a few other things… like a NYT best selling author, for example. His science-based horror books like Infected, Contagious, and Ancestor are really fun (and ookie) reads. He’s been writing a really good science fiction sports series of novels about the Galactic Football League, where humans play football side-by-side with aliens… who may be able to leap five meters in the air, run far faster than humans, and oh yeah: also might possibly want to eat the other team.

His new book in the series, The MVP, is available for pre-order starting right now! And because I am super special and wonderful and love my readers, if you pre-order the book with the coupon code badastro you get $3 off the price!

Just go to his site, order the book, and put badastro into the coupon code field to get the discount. This code also works on his other hardcovers in the GFL series, including The Starter and The All-Pro (the first novel in the series, The Rookie, is sold out of hardcover, but you can still get it as an ebook or an audiobook – when the hardcovers are gone, they’re gone.)

But why trust me? You can listen to Sigler himself barking at you about this:

Full disclosure: I get a kickback from this, but I’d tell you to buy his books anyway. Why? For one thing, they’re lots of fun. For another, Scott is an independent author, who sells these books on his own, without a publisher, and I’m all for that. It’s no exaggeration to say that he helped invent online publishing; he couldn’t find a publisher for his first book, Earthcore, so he audiocast the whole thing and gave it away for free. This was back when the word "podcast" was brand new, and Scott was way, way ahead of the curve. He turned that idea into a revolution of online publishing, loosening the stranglehold of publishing houses on books, and I honestly think we’re better off for it.

So if you buy his books you are supporting a talented writer, an indy publisher, a revolutionary, and I can afford to keep myself in Tootsie Rolls for the rest of the year.

Go buy his stuff now!

Last week, I posted an exceptional image of our home world as seen by the Suomi NPP Earth-observing satellite. The image was so popular that NASA released a second one, this time of the Eastern hemisphere, showing once again why it’s called the Blue Marble:

[Click to engaiaenate, or grab the terrestrialicious 11,500 x 11,500 pixel shot].

Like the other one, this is a mosaic, created over six different orbits — the bright north/south swaths are actually the reflection of the Sun in the ocean as the satellite passed over that area multiple times.

Although the satellite is in low Earth orbit, just a few hundred kilometers off the surface, the images have been mosaicked together to represent the view as if you were about 13,000 km (8000 miles) away. You’re seeing most of but not quite all of the entire hemisphere here. The inset image shows why; the farther you are from Earth the more of it you see.

If you’re having a hard time picturing that, imagine taking a camera and holding it a couple of centimeters from your floor. You only see a small section of the floor, right? Now take hundreds of pictures, moving the camera each time to get a different part of the floor. If you stitch those pictures together you have a complete image of your floor, even though it was too big to see from any individual shot. It’s as if you were hovering over the floor from higher up and took one shot.

That’s how this was done as well, though the pictures couldn’t just be stitched together; they had to be warped a bit to account for the Earth being round (near the Earth’s limb you’re seeing the ground at more of an angle than what’s directly below you). That’s why the image gives you such an overwhelming feeling of perspective, of actually being over the planet from all those thousands of kilometers away.

And I wonder… someday, our children may get this view every day, just by looking out a window. Every time I think about that, I get a chill. When I was a kid, that thought was science fiction. Now it’s maybe just a few more years down the road.

[UPDATE: Right after posting this, I got a feeling of deja-vu, and suddenly realized where I've seen this view of the Earth before: Apollo 17. What I wrote in that last paragraph is literally true: humans have seen this view before, and I hope that one day it will be routine to see it this way once again.]

Image credit: NASA/NOAA.

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

Every now and again, I hear this urban legend that pound for pound, the human body is actually hotter (or has more energy) than the Sun. I got this question in a recent Q&BA video chat session, so I tackled it. The answer is pretty interesting, and depends on how you ask the question!

I actually wrote about this legend on the blog a while back, and I show all the math. I really like this question, since it has a straightforward answer that makes it seem wrong, but then if you look at it more carefully the answer is a little trickier. And even in the video and that other post, it’s not really a complete answer; if you read the comments on the post you’ll see people arguing over it.

That’s really the best kind of question: the ones that keep on going! There’s always more stuff to figure out.

Visit the Q&BA Archive to see more videos like this one!

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past Pluto, giving us our first close-up view of this tiny world.

The team behind the space probe have a nice idea to help raise awareness of it: make a new US Post Office stamp commemorating it. My friend Dan Durda, both an accomplished astronomer and artist, created this lovely design of the stamp:

[Click to enhadesenate. Note: the word "Forever" means the stamp is always good for first class postage, and is crossed out here to prevent forgery.]

It shows the spacecraft going by Pluto and its (relatively) freakishly large moon Charon. I like how he didn’t go for photorealism, but instead used an oil paint-like feel for it. The stamp is meant as a followup — I might even say send-up — of a US stamp issued in 1990 about Pluto that has the label "Not Yet Explored".

I like this stamp! I’d love to see it made official, too. Alan Stern, the head guy for the mission, created a petition to help that along. It takes more than just a nice stamp design to get the PO’s notice; it has to have public support as well. I signed the petition, and if you want to, please do.

I’ll note that I expect this to raise the specter of whether Pluto is a planet or not. I have some thoughts on that, and I’ll be posting again soon on that topic.

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

A lot of people, it seems, have morbid thoughts about space. Why else would I get asked this so much: "What would happen to the human body exposed to the vacuum and cold of space?"

Of course, this sort of thing is depicted in scifi movies a lot, and people are curious about it. And even though the movies always get it wrong — you don’t explode, or freeze instantly — it does make folks wonder about it. And while the reality isn’t maybe as gooey as in the movies, it’s still pretty nasty.

I wrote about this in my review of the movie "Mission to Mars", as well as answering a question many years ago from a reader. And even though it’s an icky thing to think about, it does give me a chance to talk about heat transfer, which is pretty, um, cool.