On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency’s EPIC camera on NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit at Lagrange point 1, approximately 1 million miles from Earth, where it is balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun.
EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.
The full story is here, and a full transcript is available.
I tried to do the same thing, but I never could build a tall enough tripod! I love time-lapse photography, and used to do it a lot. Here’s one I did in 2003 when working on a wind turbine project.
Damn, that’s a pretty swirling little ball!!
I just posted a link to this on my twitter feed with the observation:
Know what you can’t see in this time-lapse?
Borders
I find NASA’s time lapse videos are very informative, and usually beautiful.
How absolutely wondrous and wonderful! Love the cloud patterns, the whorls and the spirals. Just beautiful.
If you stare at it hard enough, the earth starts to look like it’s going in reverse. Like when a semi passes on the freeway, the wheels look like they are turning in the opposite direction they are. There’s probably a word for that but I don’t know what it is.
I stared too hard and got a little dizzy. The spirals coming off Antarctica are spectacular!
I don’t know if there’s a general term for it, but I remember that being referred to as “temporal aliasing” in a computer science class when we discussing such things in film and animation.
Hurray, data!