Timelapse Earth – 4K Edition (Video)

Timelapse Earth - 4K Edition (Video) | Third Monk image 2

Timelapse Earth in 4K resolution, as imaged by the geostationary Elektro-L weather satellite, from May 15th to May 19th, 2011.

Elektro-L is located about 40,000 km above the Indian ocean. It orbits at a speed that causes it to remain over the same spot as the Earth rotates.

The satellite creates a 121 megapixel image (11136×11136 pixels) every 30 minutes with visible and infrared light wavelengths. The images were edited to adjust levels and change the infrared channel from orange to green to show vegetation more naturally. The images were resized by 50%, misalignments between frames were manually corrected, and image artifacts that occurred when the camera was facing towards the sun were partially corrected. The images were interpolated by a factor of 20 to create a smooth animation.

Timelapse Earth 1

Timelapse Earth 2

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Timelapse Earth – Wondrous Views of the Earth from Space (Video)

Timelapse Earth - Wondrous Views of the Earth from Space (Video) | Third Monk image 2

Experiencing the Overview Effect isn’t yet a realistic option for many of us, however we can enjoy the next best thing while we wait for Public Space Travel to become affordable.

These Timelapse Earth videos are a wonderful way to gain a new perspective on our Planet, each other, and ourselves.

As always, please make sure to watch these videos in High-Definition.

For pictures of the Earth from Space go: here, here, and here.

Timelapse Earth | Fly Over View from Space | NASA, ISS

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Beautiful View of Northern Lights from Space

Timelapse Earth

Planet Earth Seen from Space

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The Voyagers: A Short Film About Love, Hope, Space, and Carl Sagan (Video)

The Voyagers: A Short Film About Love, Hope, Space, and Carl Sagan (Video) | Third Monk image 3

The Voyagers is a beautiful short film by video artist and filmmaker Penny Lane, made of remixed public domain footage — a living testament to the creative capacity of remix culture — using the story of the legendary interstellar journey and the Golden Record to tell a bigger, beautiful story about love and the gift of chance.

Lane takes the Golden Record, “a Valentine dedicated to the tiny chance that in some distant time and place we might make contact,” and translates it into a Valentine to her own “fellow traveler,” all the while paying profound homage to Sagan’s spirit and legacy.

The-Voyagers-Golden-Record-1977

In 1977, NASA launched two unmanned missions into space, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Though originally intended to study Saturn and Jupiter over the course of two years, the probes have long outlasted and outtraveled their purpose and destination, having recently exited our Solar System entirely. Attached to each Voyager is a gold-plated record, known as The Golden Record — an epic compilation of images and sounds from Earth encrypted into binary code, the ultimate mixtape of humanity. Engineers predict it will last a billion years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Golden Record was conceived by the great Carl Sagan and was inspired by his childhood visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where he witnessed the famous burial of the Westinghouse time capsule. And while its story is fairly well-known, few realize it’s actually a most magical love story — the story of Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan, the creative director on the Golden Record project, with whom Sagan spent the rest of his life.

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It’s hard to imagine the Golden Record being made now. I wish Carl Sagan were here to say, ‘You know what? A thousand billion years is a really long time. Nobody can know what will happen. Why not try? Why not reach for something amazing?’ There is no way to forestall what can’t be fathomed, no way to guess what hurts we’re trying to protect ourselves from. We have to know in order to love, we have to risk everything, we have to open ourselves up to contact — even with the possibility of disaster. – Penny Lane

A Glorious Dawn- Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Acrylic on Canvas.

> A Short Film About How Carl Sagan Fell in Love | Brain Pickings

Sounds of the Cosmos – The Music of Planets and Stars (Video)

Sounds of the Cosmos - The Music of Planets and Stars (Video) | Third Monk image 2

These Sounds of Heaven are radio waves emitted by celestial objects that are then turned into sound. Science fiction and reality continue to  inch ever closer together.

Large Magellanic Cloud - Sounds of Heaven

The Voice of our Earth

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NASA Voyager Recordings – Symphonies Of The Planets 3

A fantastic recording from the space flights of Voyager I & II launched in 1977. The true ambient space sounds that come from electronic vibrations of the planets, moons and rings, electromagnetic fields of the planets and moons, planetary magnetosphere, trapped radio waves bouncing between the planet and the inner surface of it’s atmosphere, charged particle interactions of the planet, it’s moons and the solar wind, and from charged particle emissions from the rings of certain planets. All sounds are space sounds, there are no engine sounds from the space probes.

Alien Planets - Sounds of Heaven

Sounds of our Sun

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Star Sounds Made Visible with Cymatics

 Learn more about Cymatics here and here.

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Pictures of Earth from Space (Photo Gallery)

Pictures of Earth from Space (Photo Gallery) | Third Monk image 4

We all necessarily have a pinpoint focus on what matters to us in the present, but sometimes it is beneficial to take a step back and marvel at things not yet understood.

It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind and forget just how large the universe that we live in is.

Pictures of the Earth from Space give us a view into our world seen through a distant lens. Humbling us to our supposed importance, while simultaneously revealing the undeniable beauty of our Mother Earth.

Tiny Blue Dot

awe-inspiring-views-earth-saturn-ring Earth from Space

Image courtesy SSI/Caltech/NASA

On July 19, NASA’s robotic probe turned its gaze toward Saturn’s majestic rings and a tiny pale-blue dot—a planet called Earth nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away.

The Cassini orbiter snapped this historic image of its distant home world while on the far side of the giant ringed planet.

No surface features are visible since Earth takes up only a scant few pixels—however, its unique blue tinge caused by sunlight reflecting off our planet’s oceans clearly shines through.

Tiny Speck

awe-inspiring-views-earth-full-rings Earth from Space

Image courtesy SSI/NASA

Swinging onto the night side of Saturn in 2006, the Cassini spacecraft snapped this stunning back-lit view of the gas giant’s rings along with Earth—a tiny speck of light nearly lost just above and to the left of the bright main rings.

This panoramic view of the Saturn system with the Earth represents only the second time our planet has been photographed from deep space.

Back in 1990 the Voyager probe heading out of the solar system snapped the first view of our water-rich world looking like a pale-blue dot from a distance of four billion miles.

Space Beacon

awe-inspiring-views-earth-stars Earth from Space

  Image courtesy SSI/Caltech/NASA

Earth shines like a bright starlike beacon at the center of this image, with the moon just underneath.

This raw snapshot taken on July 19 by Cassini spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera shows that from a distance of 898,410,414 miles (1,445,851,410 kilometers), Earth looks like nothing more than a bright stellar object floating among a backdrop of fainter stars.

Earth From Mars

awe-inspiring-views-earth-mars Earth from Space

Image courtesy Texas A&M/Cornell/NASA

Earth appears as a tiny speck caught up in a Martian sunrise in the first photo of its kind taken from the surface of another planet beyond the moon.

This historic image was captured by the Mars rover Spirit in 2004. Another rover named Mars Pathfinder tried to take a similar photo of Earth in 1997, but its view was obstructed by clouds.

Earth Rising

awe-inspiring-views-earth-apollo Earth from Space

Photograph courtesy NASA

Like a cosmic blue marble, Earth appears to hang in the space above the lunar surface in this historic portrait taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders in December 1968. Before this mission, no person had ever seen or photographed Earth from deep space, and this famous “Earthrise” view helped inspire an entire generation of environmentalists.

Earth in Detail

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  Image courtesy MODIS/USGS/NASA

This classic blue marble view of Earth represents the most detailed true-color image of our entire planet to date.

Most of the images were seamlessly stitched together to create this mosaic view—snapped by NASA’s Terra environmental satellite from 435 miles (700 kilometers) above.

Light Show

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Image courtesy NASA

What look like sparkling jewels scattered across the night side of Earth are in fact the telltale signs of the expansion of people worldwide. The light pollution from cities and towns, mostly across darkened North America and Europe, dominate this satellite image.

This global view of Earth’s night lights was acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite over 21 days in 2012, taking 312 orbits and collecting 2.5 terabytes of data to cover the entire surface of Earth.

> Stunning Pictures | National Geographic

Spiders on Drugs – How Do Different Drugs Affect Their Webs? (Study)

Spiders on Drugs - How Do Different Drugs Affect Their Webs? (Study) | Third Monk image 8

Ever wondered what kind of web a spider on drugs would create? Apparently NASA scientists get way more high than I do, because the thought never crossed my mind. They sought to investigate:

The possibility of using thread connection fine structure as a measure of drug effects on fine motor coordination. – R. Jackson, Division of Research N.C. Dept. of Mental Health

What were the results? Unsurprisingly, drugs do affect the motor function of spiders. However, the different shapes of their webs on each drug is fascinating. 

Drug-free Spider Web

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Marijuana

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LSD

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Mescaline

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Caffeine

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Benzedrine

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Chloral Hydrate (Minor Sedative)

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Drug Effects on Spiders

Just for the Giggles

For the full report on the study, go here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – We Stopped Dreaming, Imbalance of NASA and Military Budget (Video)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming, Imbalance of NASA and Military Budget (Video) | Third Monk image 4

The intention of the Penny 4 NASA project is to stress the importance of advancing the space frontier and is focused on igniting scientific curiosity in the general public.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – We Stopped Dreaming

Spending Resources in the Wrong Places

I’m tired of saying this but I have to say it again! The NASA budget is 4/10’s of one penny on a tax dollar. If I held up a tax dollar and I cut horizontally into it 4/10’s of 1% of its width, it doesn’t even get you into the ink! SO I WILL NOT ACCEPT A STATEMENT THAT SAYS “WE CAN”T AFFORD IT!”

Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when somebody says we don’t have enough money for the space program I’m asking its not that you don’t have enough money , its that the distribution of money your spending is warped, in some way that your removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, the city of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow, all that ended in the 1970’s after we stopped going to the moon, it all ended, we stopped dreaming. So, I worry that the decisions that congress make doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, tomorrows gone.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – A New Perspective

Dissolving Our Artificial Boundaries

Photo of Earth. Rising over the lunar landscape. Earthrise over the moon. There was Earth. Seen not as the mapmaker would have you identify it. No. The countries were not color coded with boundaries. It was seen as nature intended it to be viewed. Oceans. Land. Clouds.

We went to the moon and we discovered Earth! I claim we discovered Earth. For the first time. How does that affect culture? I got a list! The instance that photo comes out, that is the identifying cover picture of the whole Earth catalog. Thinking of Earth as a whole. Not as a place where nations war. As a whole.

Imbalance of the NASA Budget

NASA Vs Military Budget Pie Chart Comparison

 

Decrease of NASA Budget Allocation

 

Choice Between Discovery and Destruction

Aurora Borealis Orbital Time Lapse from Space, NASA Fly Over (Video)

Aurora Borealis Orbital Time Lapse from Space, NASA Fly Over (Video) | Third Monk

This orbital time lapse, compiled by Michael König, combines “photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011.” König says the video is the result of some post-production tweaking—it’s been “refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc.”—but there’s no software gimmick that can match up to being slapped in the face with the Aurora Borealis in HD. I wanted to file this under “looks so good it can’t possibly be real,” but this is the real deal—all the goods come straight from NASA.

Shooting locations in order of appearance:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night