Cities at Night, from Space

Here’s a link to a fascinating video. Taken from the space shuttle, this 10 minute video shows photos of cities at night from around the world. Check out the spoke based cities of Europe and how they contrast to the grid-based cities of the American west. The photos were taken using a home-made barn-door photography platform, which was used to compensate for the earth’s movement. It’s very rare that I watch videos of this length, and in fact I thought I would just take a quick look, but it’s so fascinating to see these cities from above, at night, that I watched the whole thing without noticing the time.

Cities at Night, an Orbital Tour Around the World

My on again, off again interest in astronomy is on the rise again, and this time I plan to focus on an area that’s always held my interest, astrophotography. I’ve dabbled before, but never really engaged, but I think this time will be different. Rather than focusing on some telescope I wanted to buy, and then trying to figure out if I could use it for astrophotography, I began with trying to understand what equipment I would need to take quality images. A high quality motorized German equatorial mount seems to be the place to start.

While that does imply some shopping in the future, I decided to give it a shot using my existing photography equipment. And so I took my camera and tripod outside last night, and started taking photos of Jupiter and the Milky Way. At first I was going to try and shoot “star trails” but decided instead to just take a few slightly lengthy exposures and see how things worked out.

Overall, I’m ok with my first results. There is a bit of star trailing, but the focus seems good and my first attempt at astro image processing using Lightroom’s rich controls gives me hope for even better results as I gain experience. Actually, I’m happy enough that I’m likely going to get an appropriate motorized mount (which will move the camera at the same rate the earth turns, thus removing the star trails) and just use my camera for a while (though as George correctly noted, I really do want something like an 80mm refractor).

Below are the two best images of the night, viewing the Milky Way, looking east. Both photos were taken using my Canon 350D with the 17-55/F2.8 lens. I opened up all the way to 2.8 and used the camera’s remote control to minimize vibrations. Using the bulb setting, I exposed the first image for 17 seconds, and the second for 40.

I didn’t make a Flickr set with only two photos, but you may click either of the images below to see a larger version at Flickr.

Back when I was a kid we had nothing like modern weather radar systems to keep us informed about storms and heavy weather. As I recall, there was some trick involving tuning the TV (antenna, of course, no cable back then) to an unused channel; exactly how this was supposed to warn us of tornadoes wasn’t ever clearly understood, at least not by me at the ripe age of somewhere between 6 and 8 years old.

But today … there’s some fairly serious tornado action southwest of us, and besides the local TV news providing very good coverage, I’ve been watching along on the computer.

Here’s what the weather radar looked like a few minutes ago. We’re the pink dot a bit to the right of the current storm action (shown in red and orange) down in Great Bend. We’ll likely not see any real severe weather here tonight; no complaints about that!

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Update: Minutes after posting comes word that the town of Greensburg has suffered extremely heavy damage; here’s a thumbnail of the tornado that caused the extensive damage. According to the National Weather Service, Greensburg suffered a direct hit from the tornado, which has been reported as being almost a mile wide! Greensburg is about 120 miles southwest of Lindsborg.

Click to see a larger version.

Though almost 10 years old, these fascinating photos were recently chosen as NASA’s image(s) of the day. This image is of Jupiter’s moon Io, and shows two sulfurous eruptions. The one in the middle has been visible in every picture taken since 1979.

The Mars Exploration Rovers continue to function and provide useful scientific data more than two years after arriving on the Red Planet. Here’s a recent image showing Earth as seen from Mars; humbling, isn’t it?

Click the image to see a larger version.