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

Thanks to astronaut Ron Garan on Google+, I was alerted to some amazing footage of the Moon setting as seen by astronauts on board the International Space Station. I uploaded it to YouTube and added some comments to show you something really cool…

[Set it to high-def and make it full screen!]

Astonishing, isn’t it? As the Moon sets, you’re seeing it through thicker and thicker air. The air acts like a lens, bending the light upward. The part of the Moon nearer the Earth’s limb gets bent up more, so the Moon looks like it’s getting flattened. Watch it again; the top of the Moon doesn’t appear to be affected much. It looks more like the bottom slows down and the top pushes into it. You can read about this effect in more detail in an earlier blog post.

Weirdly, as I watched the video, it looked very much like the whole Moon was shrinking as it set, as if it were receding rapidly. When I saw that I knew intuitively that couldn’t be real; the ISS is only moving a few thousand kilometers over the time this whole video was taken (about ten minutes), not nearly enough to see that big a change in the size of the Moon. It’s 400,000 kilometers away, after all! So I measured the size of the Moon on the screen, and incredibly the width doesn’t change. Do you see it appear to shrink too? It’s an illusion!

Funny how our brain interprets such things. As if seeing a gigantic rock moving through the sky while perched on board a football-field sized satellite moving at 30,000 km/hr isn’t weird enough!

Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth".

This video is only 20 seconds long, but wow. Simply, wow.

[Note: I've noticed sometimes the video won't load and you get a black space. Try hitting refresh, or just click the link in the next sentence.]

This was created using a series of still images from the International Space Station on December 29, 2011, over the course of about 20 minutes. The ISS was orbiting over Africa at the time, as it passed from the center of the continent to Madagascar and then over the ocean. The flashes of light are from storms on our planet’s surface.

In the sky, though, the Milky Way steals the scene as it rises over the eastern horizon. Toward the end of the video, what I thought for a moment was a reflection of the Milky Way on the glass of the ISS turns out to actually be Comet Lovejoy, which was still visible at the time. You can also see the thin green arc of airglow over the Earth before the rising Sun ends the video.

If it weren’t copyrighted, I would’ve added Enya’s "Storms in Africa" track to this. It seems appropriate.

… and if there’s a metaphor here for overcoming adversity — whatever that may mean to you — well then, feel free to ruminate over it.

Credit: NASA

NASA’s Earth Observatory site just put up this amazing picture. I have to say, this is one of the cooler pictures from the International Space Station that I’ve seen. Not for it’s beauty or anything like that — though it is starkly lovely — but because of what it shows:

[Click to dicraternate.]

Obviously, that’s a volcano on the right: Emi Koussi, in northern Africa. But look to the left, almost at the edge of the picture. See that faded ring? That’s Aorounga — an impact crater, some 10 – 15 km wide, formed when a chunk of cosmic debris hit the Earth about 300 million years ago! So these are two craters, one formed from processes happening deep below the Earth, and one from events from far above. Yet both can be seen at the same time, from one vantage point: orbiting our planet somewhere above the surface but beneath the rest of the Universe.

Image credit: NASA

Assuming you had other things on your mind this past weekend, you may have missed the foofooraw of a Russian rocket booster that re-entered over Europe on Saturday. It was part of a rocket that took new crew up to the International Space Station a few days ago, and was expected to come back down at that time. It was seen by a lot of people, because it happened at 5:30 p.m. local time on a clear night, so a lot of folks were out. It was also bright and spectacular… as you can see for yourself in this amazing footage taken in Germany:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Make sure to set it to the highest resolution, and make it full screen. When it’s in focus (cameras sometimes have a hard time focusing on objects at infinity) you can see parts of the booster breaking off and making their own trails as they burn up. The bright star passed by the fireball is Jupiter (the two stars above it are part of Aries), and then you can see it pass under the Pleiades, and then the bright star Aldebaran in Taurus.

There are lots of other videos of this amazing event; a search on YouTube will show you quite a few. This one shows the smaller pieces better than any video I’ve seen so far, though.

Things like this happen pretty often, but not generally over heavily populated areas at such an opportune time in the evening. To my knowledge, no one has ever been seriously hurt or killed by falling debris like this; what you’re seeing is happening very high in the atmosphere, and most of the pieces burn up. Keep in mind, too, the Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft — which was supposed to go to Mars, but never left Earth orbit — will be coming back down in early January. Reports on exactly when still vary a bit, and we don’t know where it will re-enter. I’ll have more on that when I know more.

Earlier, I posted an incredible picture of Comet Lovejoy taken by space station astronaut Dan Burbank. NASA just posted an amazing time lapse video made from those pictures!

Holy wow! What an astonishing sight that must be. And did you see the object moving right-to-left a few seconds in, just above the green airglow layer? I suspect that was a low-Earth satellite in a different orbit, moving in a different direction. The storms over a dark Australia below make this video that much more dreamlike.

But it’s real. A comet found by an amateur astronomer, observed the world around — and above — and then seen and photographed from space by a man floating in an internationally designed and built habitat in orbit.

That is, quite simply, very cool.

Tip o’ the lens cap to Asteroid Watch.

I know I post a lot of pictures I describe as amazing, lovely, breath-taking, jaw-dropping… but that’s only because it’s always true. In this case, though, I think those adjectives fall way, way short in describing the seriously paralyzing beauty of this photograph: Comet Lovejoy, as seen by an astronaut on board the International Space Station:

[Click to encomanate -- and yes. you need to.]

Oh. My.

This stunning photo was taken by astronaut Dan Burbank as the ISS passed over Australia at 17:40 GMT on December 21, 2011 [update: more pix here]. It was early morning over Australia at the time, and you can see the dark limb of the Earth, the thin green line of airglow (atoms in the upper atmosphere slowly releasing the energy they accumulated over the day), some southern hemisphere stars… and of course, the incredible, ethereal, other-worldly beauty of Comet Lovejoy, its tails sweeping majestically into the sky.

Wait, what? "Tails", plural? Yup. Hang on a sec. I’ll get to that.

First, the comet was discovered by amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy in November. It turned out to be a sungrazer, a comet whose orbit plunges it deep into the inner solar system and very close to the Sun’s surface. It screamed past our star last week, on December 15/16, and, amazingly, survived the encounter. Some sungrazers do and some don’t, but Lovejoy is bigger than usual for such a comet, and that may have helped it remain intact as it passed less than 200,000 km over the Sun’s inferno-like surface.

Now the comet is moving back out, away from the Sun and back to the frozen depths of deep space. But the Sun’s heat, even from its greater distance now, is not to be denied. Comets are composed of rock and ice — the ice being what we normally think of as liquid or gas, like ammonia, carbon dioxide, and even good ol’ water. The heat from the Sun turns that ice directly into a gas (in a process called sublimation), which expands around the solid nucleus of the comet, forming what’s called the coma. Pressure from sunlight as well as the solar wind blows this material away from the comet head, resulting in the lovely tail, which can sweep back for millions of kilometers.
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