As they soar above Planet Earth on the International Space Station, astronauts regularly point their cameras toward home, and their images are stored on a massive archive of astronaut photos. Science educator James Drake took 600 such images and stitched them together into a movie, which you can see below.
The movie starts in the Pacific Ocean and flies over North and South America before sunrise over Antarctica. The neuronal network of nighttime cities is marvelous to behold – not to mention the electrical storms off the southern coast of Mexico and out into the Pacific.
It takes roughly a minute to traverse the distance from Vancouver Island to the southern portion of Chile. An actual latitudinal arc on the ISS takes much longer, naturally, but this fast view is somewhat humbling – this planet is not really that big. Plus, you glean an appreciation for just how much of it is ocean.
Raw data was downloaded from the Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth, a Johnson Space Center project. Visit the website to see even more astronaut images, which should keep you satisfied until the ISS gets a pair of streaming video cameras sometime next year.
Filed under: Manned Space Flight
