Imagine the view the astronauts onboard the ISS get to taste every day. The Earth from orbit – surely a beautiful image that will navigate its way safely into your memory and stay with you forever.
Well that’s great for astronauts and well they deserve it. Thankfully enough for us astronauts frequently aim their cameras toward Earth and their images are uploaded to a huge archive. James Drake, a science educator added 600 such images, stitched them together and produced this amazing HD timelapse movie.
From the Pacific Ocean, flying over the Americas before reaching sunrise over Antarctica this video is stunning even showing the network of night-time cities that inhabit Earth and lightning storms past the southern coast of Mexico.
Raw data was downloaded from NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth which is a Johnson Space Center project hosting the best and most complete online collection of astronaut photographs of the Earth which should keep interested followers busy until the ISS gets it’s new streaming HD video cameras in 2012.
View Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth here.
We’ve brought you many videos in recent weeks which show fantastic time-lapse scenes (the Aurora and various videos featuring the Milky Way) and all have shown beautifully how the heavens move across the sky in a graceful nightly display…
But that’s not strictly accurate is it? Highlighted below is a new twist on what you’ve already seen, wonderful sky-scapes only this time the heavens remain fixed and it’s the Earth we see moving!
So why is the Earth moving in the above video? Here the frames have been digitally rotated so that it is the stars that stay (approximately) steady, with the Earth moving beneath them. This dramatically shows the actual rotation of the Earth, called diurnal motion, in a clear and moving way.
Filmed at the Very Large Telescopes (VLT) in Chile, four of the largest optical telescopes anywhere in the world, you can see the original this was created from in the second video here.
Cool eh!?
Credit: S. Guisard & Jose Salgado, ESO, Bulletpeople.com
After watching again the beautiful work by Terje Sorgjerd (The Aurora and The Mountain) I thought I’d have another look around for other videos in a similar vein. The two videos below are truly stunning, and perfect example of what draws so many people to astronomy and stargazing in general.
ALMA Time Lapse Sequence – Shot on location at the ALMA array in the Atacama Desert, Chile on June 2010 (credit to Jose Francisco Delgado).
VLT Time Lapse Sequence – Shot on location at ESO‘s VLT at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile (credit to Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado).
Beautiful stuff, makes you feel kinda small doesn’t it? I particularly love the second video as it seems to have everything, wide vistas, time lapse from inside the ‘scopes (which I’ve never seen before and they’re awesome), many shots of the VLT laser guide star and possibly the first “Milky Way-set” I’ve ever seen!
Now, when will the clouds scuppering my astrophotography aspirations over the south east UK finally cut me a break!?
A great follow-up to mattelk’s post about Terje Sorgjerd’s “Aurora Borealis” time lapse video, he’s been out again this time in Tenerife (in the Canary Islands). Switch to HD and full-screen it to fully appreciate the beauty of this film.
“This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide. Spain´s highest mountain (3718m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories.
The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies.
A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.
Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32″.
Music by: Ludovico Einaudi – “Nuvole bianche”
Awesome stuff, would love to be able to do this one day!
