Tag Archives: Space

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The Earth in HD: Live from Space

The view of Earth from the International Space Station is spectacular. For some time, I’ve considered embedding a live feed from a video camera attached to the ISS. When the camera was recently upgraded to HD, the sharper images convinced me that now was the time. A 24-7 view of our home planet from 268 miles up (431 km) is to some space geeks what kitty videos are to “normal” people. Addictive and mesmerizing.

Traveling at 17,000 miles an hour, the ISS encounters a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes. Of course, they’re beautiful, but even more stunning IMHO are the views of the planet gliding by in full light far below. And at night, if you tune in at the right time, you can see cities around the world marked by their glowing lights.

Enjoy the live feed below. If you want to learn more about the ISS, check out this NASA website devoted to the orbiting science laboratory.



Mapping data is set for Phoenix, Arizona. You can change the settings to your own location and see out more great features offered by the satellite tracking site, n2yo, here. (Donations are encouraged.)

Second, non-HD, live stream from the International Space Station (below).

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Why Are People Excited About Solar Power? One Picture Says it All.

Photo of the Sun, with a scaled photo of the Earth above it (© 2011 Osha Gray Davidson)

Since we have a current satellite HD photo of the Sun on this page every day (courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory), we wanted to put the features seen on the Sun in perspective. See that tiny blue dot above the Sun? That’s our home, superimposed in true scale on the image of the sun.

It’s easy to see how the sun has such a tremendous influence on the Earth, and why solar power has so much promise.

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Sunscape | The Beauty of Our Star

Sunscape 15

Our Star: The Sun

Like many others who lived through the Carl Sagin Cosmos Era, I’m mesmerized by images of distant galaxies, nebulae, and supernovae. With billion and billions of cosmic objects to explore, it’s easy to overlook the cosmic grandeur in our own neighborhood, the Sun. (The term “neighborhood” is used in its astronomical sense, given that the Sun is nearly 93 million miles from Earth.)

Yet, Sunscapes are beautiful and richly diverse, largely because the gases that make up the Sun have been superheated to the point that they are sensitive to magnetism. The patterns we see on the surface — and deep into the interior — are those unseen magnetic fields made visible by the hot gases. It’s a bit like “seeing” the wind by watching the patterns of movement in a wheat field as wind blows across the land.

The Sunscape above was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite launched in 2010 for a five-year mission studying the Sun. The SDO uses imaging devices so sensitive that the resulting data stream provides as much detail as a high-def screen. (You can read more about the SDO, here.)

The images provide scientists an unprecedented amount of data to help understand solar activity. These images also allow us to see the powerful beauty present in the Sun in ways we’ve never been able to — before the SDO.

The detailed image above was taken from the SDO daily photograph found in our widget at the top, right-hand corner of the page. To explore the full image, simply right-click on the widget photo, and choose “View image” from the drop-down menu.

Here’s a fascinating (and beautiful) video from NASA showing how the SDO works: