A few more images of Earth for you

I added a few more links to the “Satellite images, imagery operators, and business” column (on the right). For your efforts, though, you also get to click on them here: http://earthgazer.tumblr.com/ : A nice Tumblr image site with random pictures of Earth’s surface from space. http://imagesoftheearth.com/ : Just a website with various images of Earth […]

A word to the WISE…

This article is sort of a bittersweet reminder to me because the company that let me go (due to government money concerns), Space Dynamics Laboratory, is the builder of this satellite: the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE. They want to reactivate it and use it to hunt for rogue asteroids, among other things. This is […]

Pop Quiz answer

Several days ago, I posted these two pictures with a vaguely worded question: https://themadspaceball.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/one-of-these-things/ I promised an answer to that question and here it is: the top picture was taken from low earth orbit (LEO), the bottom from geosynchronous (GEO) orbit. How can one tell from just the pictures? Two big telltales exist in them. […]

Missed it, by that much.

In light of the Sakurajima volcanic eruption in Japan, I present to you a picture of the very active volcano. From January 2013. There don’t appear to be any other images yet of Sunday’s eruption. This image comes courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory page. But it initially came to my attention from the Bad Astronomer page, […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 6

In my last aside, I noted it was interesting the Hubble telescope was using a low earth orbit (LEO) to conduct its mission, considering some of the challenges inherent in such a low orbit. So let’s start with the first challenge. A low earth orbiting (LEO) satellite is going around the Earth really quickly. There […]