Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the largest known vortex in the Solar System. It’s big enough to engulf several Earths as shown in this artist’s rendition. — Michael Carroll
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Japan’s MTSAT-2 (also known as Himawari-7) collected these images of yesterday’s annular solar eclipse from geostationary orbit.
The satellite (similar to the United State’s GOES satellites), observed the moon’s shadow as it passed over Australia & the Pacific Ocean. The image sequence begins at 21:32 UTC, with an additional image each hour until 02:32 UTC. The eclipse itself lasted from 22:33 UTC until 02:20 UTC.
On another April 12th, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human to see planet Earth from space.
Image Credit: ISS Expedition 30, NASA
Commenting on his view from orbit he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly”. On yet another April 12th, in 1981 NASA launched the first space shuttle. To celebrate in 2013, consider this image from the orbiting International Space Station, a stunning view of the planet at night from low Earth orbit. Constellations of lights connecting the densely populated cities along the Atlantic east coast of the United States are framed by two Russian spacecraft docked at the space station.
Easy to recognize cities include New York City and Long Island at the right. From there, track toward the left for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and then Washington DC near picture center.
![Earth at Twilight
No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth.
Image Credit: ISS Expedition 2 Crew, Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA
[Original image here]
Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet’s nurturing atmosphere.
A clear high altitude layer, visible along the dayside’s upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the blackness of space. This picture actually is a single digital photograph taken in June of 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/57bc3132756007cff1e94c9bb7b033ad/tumblr_mktpjxoG1I1qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth.
Image Credit: ISS Expedition 2 Crew, Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA
Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet’s nurturing atmosphere.
A clear high altitude layer, visible along the dayside’s upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the blackness of space. This picture actually is a single digital photograph taken in June of 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles.
EarthArt: the Flower at the End of the Nile
Rising in the Great Lakes of Africa, the Nile flows more than 4,000 miles north, watering a green valley through the desert and flowering as it approaches the Mediterranean into one of the world’s largest deltas.
The image was captured on Thursday, February 21 by the the MODIS instrument on the Terra satellite. A feathery filagree of cirrus clouds floats above the delta at high altitude, composed mostly of ice crystals.
The closest point to the Sun in a planet’s orbit is called Perihelion. The furthest point is called Aphelion. The planet moves fastest at perihelion and slowest at aphelion.
GIFs extracted from Year On Earth
Planets in our Solar System orbit the Sun. The orbits of some planets are almost perfect circles, but others are not. Some orbits are shaped more like ovals, or “stretched out” circles.
Scientists call these oval shapes “ellipses”. If a planet’s orbit is a circle, the Sun is at the center of that circle. If, instead, the orbit is an ellipse, the Sun is at a point called the “focus” of the ellipse, which is not quite the same as the center.
Since the Sun is not at the center of an elliptical orbit, the planet moves closer towards and further away from the Sun as it orbits. The place where the planet is closest to the Sun is called perihelion.
When the planet is furthest away from the Sun, it is at aphelion. The words “aphelion” and “perihelion” come from the Greek language. In Greek, “helios” mean Sun, “peri” means near, and “apo” means away from.
Amazing Views of the World’s Volcanoes From the International Space Station
Head over to the source link and take a look through this awesome gallery of Volcanoes as snapped by the ISS over Earth:
Few people have seen as many volcanoes as the astronauts that inhabit the International Space Station.
Not only does their imaging of the Earth’s surface capture volcanism action, but it can provide remote sensing information on volcanoes that geologists cannot visit with any regularity. In honor of the thousands of volcano images that have been taken from the ISS, I present a gallery of some of the best shots I found, including some volcanoes that most people don’t even know exist!
This new global view of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite.
Credit: NASA’s Earth Observatory/NOAA/DOD
The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
The image was made possible by the satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight.
The day-night band observed Hurricane Sandy, illuminated by moonlight, making landfall over New Jersey on the evening of Oct. 29. Night images showed the widespread power outages that left millions in darkness in the wake of the storm.
"Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould […] deal with a data set some three billion years out of date."
Lynn Margulis
A massive crack in the ice may herald an enormous rift in the ice of the Pine Island Glacier in western Antarctica.
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Satellite images suggest that the glacier is poised to calve off an iceberg or icebergs that size of New York City. Sea ice has kept the unstable region locked in, but as this Oct. 26, 2012 Landsat 7 image reveals, the spring melt has cleared the sea in front of the glacier’s calving face.
“The home planet of an emerging technical civilization, struggling to avoid self-destruction. The Earth travels some 2 and a half million kilometers every day around the Sun; eight times faster than that around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy; and, perhaps, twice faster still as the Milky Way falls toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies. We have always been space travelers.” — Carl Sagan
Image by the Russian Federal Space Agency
"When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there’s only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules."
Carl Sagan
