Specialization is for Insects.
With the many different views during and after the attacks on the World Trade Center, I truly thought I had seen every angle, view, video, etc. However, recently I was made aware of a much different view of the attacks on the World Trade Center: From The International Space Station:
Amazing that it looks so very small from up there and yet is one of the worst disasters in world history.
Well folks, last night I reported that a lunar eclipse was going to occur a few hours ahead of time. Hopefully everyone in the North American area was able step outside and observe it for a while. I sat out there for hours and it was magnificent.
I took some photos of the event, though my camera is not really set up for this kind of work, so they aren’t great. But here is a little overview of what I saw. The individual pictures are later in this post.
Stages of the Lunar Eclipse
In about 3 hours, the last lunar eclipse of the decade is going to occur, and it’s going to be a good one!
According to the Griffith Observatory:
It is also the highest in the sky that a totally eclipsed Moon has appeared from Los Angeles in 1,591 years and it will not be this high again for at least another millennium.
The entire event is visible from North America and western South America. Observers along South America’s east coast miss the late stages of the eclipse because they occur after moonset. Likewise much of Europe and Africa experience moonset while the eclipse is in progress. Only northern Scandinavians can catch the entire event from Europe. For observers in eastern Asia the Moon rises in eclipse. None of the eclipse is visible from south and east Africa, the Middle East or South Asia.
Thanks to Mitch over at Planet5D for finding this little gem…
Six weeks, and over 100 hours of footage shot on several Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs culminate in this remarkable, 4-minute time lapse of the second to last Space Shuttle Discovery launch.
With the help of everyone from shuttle technicians to crane operators to escorts (86-year-old NASA retiree Charlie Parker was particularly valuable in squiring Andrews’ team around) the photographers positioned multiple cameras—up to nine at any one time—inside the cavernous assembly building to click away while the orbiter, fuel tank, and twin solid rocket boosters were “stacked†for launch.
Scott Andrews figures the finished video represents tens of thousands of individual frames and at least 100 hours of shooting, using the highest-resolution digital single-lens-reflex cameras on the market. Jirman did the color correction, which took a week alone.
This is a very cool little video animation that someone created. I can’t imagine how long it took to draw every page of this flipbook, but if you ask me without YouTube it wouldn’t have been worth it! Actually I can imagine what it took because the author said…
It’s something like 2100 pages long, and about 50 jotter books. I’d say I worked on and off it for roughly 3 weeks.
Anyway, here is “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything”. Not quite as detailed as Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I
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Six years ago, at exactly this moment, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated above the skys south of Dallas, TX in a catastrophe that shocked the world. I think it’s appropriate that we honor the memory of those fallen astronauts who gave their lives in the quest to expand human knowledge.
Chris Valentines produced the following video by reconstructing the entire Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and synchronizing a number of video and audio recordings into a single real time stream of the disaster. He’s also got a lot more analysis and commentary on the timeline of events on his site.
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I thought this was cool, so just wanted to share this true-color Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image of a cloud-free view of the Middle Eastern countries surrounding the Fertile Crescent. (I got the image from NASA.)
Arching along the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea from the Red Sea through modern-day Syria, and then across to the Persian Gulf in an upside-down “u†shape, the Fertile Crescent is a rich, food growing area in an otherwise dry, barren land. Anciently, the land nurtured some of the earliest recorded human civilizations. Even today, a narrow strip of green along the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River marks out the Fertile Crescent.
The description from this fascinating video is:
As part of the Saturday Morning Science program by Don Pettit during Expedition 6 to the International Space Station, his video “Cities at Night; an Orbital Tour Around the World” is a video made from digital still images. This video was made for educational presentations.
You can see an entire overview of the Cities at Night project here.
Frankly, as cool as the cities look from space, what I find most amazing is how they actually took these photos! Those freaking astronauts are improvisational geniuses! Don Pettit built and installed a “barn-door tracker†– from spare parts no less – to enable him to take nighttime photographs from the International Space Station.
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Almost a year ago I wrote about the new Microsoft Photosynth technology, calling it The coolest photo technology I’ve ever seen. I still think that. Dammit! How much longer do we have to wait for a public release? Seriously this is Microsoft’s main problem – they… take… too… long… to… do… anything. Let’s have it already!
Anyway, here is a neat demo of the technology as applied to the Space Shuttle. You need to follow this link to go and actually check out the image collection.
For Endeavour’s historic launch on August 7th, 2007, Live Labs joined forces with NASA to provide a Photosynth tour of the shuttle from vehicle assembly building to the launch pad. Thousands of photos intertwine to provide three dimensional, 360 degree perspectives of one of human kind’s greatest innovations.
