There are thousands of photos of the Earth from Space to be found on the Internet. These are just a few of my favourites. Others on this site show interesting cloud formations, some from Space. See also The BBC’s Choice of the Best Photos of 2014 – The Most Stunning Space Pictures of 2014.
The subtropical Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast are pictured in the image above, acquired on 8th September 2011. To the north, multiple contrails can be seen over the dark blue water. To the east, the desert flatlands of Morocco and the Western Sahara are visible. The Portuguese archipelago, Madeira, lies to the north-west. El Hierro, nicknamed Isla del Meridiano (the “Meridian Island”), is the smallest and farthest south and west of the Canary Islands, in the extreme bottom left of the image above.
See earthquake-report•com and follow the links for the latest information.
In July 2011, volcanic tremors began on the island of El Hierro in the Canary Islands; by September, many tourists evacuated the resort island, fearing a volcanic eruption. In early October, an underwater volcanic vent began erupting, sending ash and chemicals into the sea and causing muddy discolouration of the waters south of the island. Reports from a recent underwater survey by a Spanish research vessel revealed the presence of an eruptive vent and crater about 150 metres below the surface, accompanied by submarine ‘pillow’ lavas — pillow-shaped lavas that form underwater. The vent location was marked by brownish discolouration off the south tip of the island. Currents diluted and dispersed the volcanic material to the south and west.
In early June 2011 Chile’s Puyehue–Cordón Caulle erupted; in late October the plume was much smaller than at first, topping out at about 4.5 km. However, high atmospheric winds carry the ash away and disrupt air travel throughout the region. Depending on the wind, ash from Puyehue-Cordón Caulle carries as far as 120 to 250 km from the vent.
The map shows the location of Puyehue–Cordón Caulle Volcano (PCCVC means Puyehue–Cordón Caulle Volcanic Complex) in the Southern Volcanic Zone of the Andes (in red). The barbed line indicates the Peru–Chile Trench; the arrow and numbers indicate the Nazca Plate’s velocity.
Though it is all composed of frozen water, ice is not uniform. On 7th October 2011 this image was taken of a variety of ice types off the coast of East Antarctica. Brilliant white ice fills the right half of this image. It is fast ice, and derives its name from the fact that it holds fast to the shore. This ice is thick enough to completely hide the underlying sea-water, hence its brilliant white colour. Trapped within the fast ice, and stuck along the edge of it, are icebergs.
Ice shelves can range in thickness from tens to hundreds of metres, and the icebergs that calve off of them can tower over nearby sea ice.
The water-saturated ice leaves a blue tinge. The icebergs along the edge of the fast ice are likely to be grounded on the shallow sea floor, and their presence may help hold the fast ice in place. Farther out to sea is pack ice that drifts with winds and currents. Much thinner than the fast ice, the translucent pack ice appears in shades of blue-grey.
See also pictures of the Milky Way, and in particular the Milky Way from Ventnor, Isle of Wight.
The Yukon river originates in British Columbia, Canada, and flows through Yukon Territory before entering Alaska. In south-western Alaska, the Yukon Delta spreads out in a vast tundra plain, where the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers meander toward the Bering Sea (just right of that label in the map). Looking a little like branching and overlapping blood vessels, the rivers and streams flow through circuitous channels toward the sea, passing and feeding a multitude of coastal ponds and lakes. Over such low-lying, mostly treeless terrain, the rivers can change course frequently and carve new channels to find the fastest route toward the sea. The grassy plain provided not just a corridor for migrating wildlife, but also a home to the ancestors of today’s Native Americans. People have lived here for thousands of years, and the Yukon Delta is one of Alaska’s most populated rural areas, home to thousands of Yup’ik people.
A butterfly-like aurora flutters over snow-covered mountains in Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.
The aurora borealis over mountains in Ulsfjord, Norway. Particles in the solar wind collide with gas molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere, transferring some of their energy and boosting the molecules’ electrons into an ‘excited’ state. As the electrons return to their normal or ‘ground’ state, the molecules emit light of a characteristic colour: green for oxygen and red for nitrogen, the two main gases in our atmosphere.
This panorama over the island of Kvaloya in Norway showcases a variety of different astronomical objects and phenomena. A curtain of ‘Northern Lights’ (aurora borealis) shimmers in our atmosphere while at the centre of the image a bright moon is partly obscured by clouds. Much farther from Earth, the Pleiades star cluster twinkles above the moon, and other distant stars complete this dramatic scene, high above the Arctic Circle. The panorama comprises four images.
Aurora Australis from the International Space Station. Astronauts on the International Space Station used a digital camera to capture this image of the ‘aurora australis’ or ‘southern lights’ over the Indian Ocean on 17th September 2011.
A more conventional view of the Aurora Australis) with typical icebergs in the sea. (This picture and the others from Iceland have nothing to do with the International Space Station.)
This time-lapse image shows the rotation of the Earth from the vantage point of Ecuador on the day of the Equinox in 2010. As the sun passed overhead then sank into the west it burned a bright path across the middle of the sky in this long-exposure image. Then, as the sky darkened, the stars became visible, the Earth’s spin making them trace their own circular paths about the north and south celestial poles.
The long exposure gives the illusion of daylight, but it’s the light of the full moon which is creating a rainbow in the mist of Yosemite Falls in Yosemite National Park, California. The star trails were achieved using more than 500 individual exposures over the course of several hours.
See also this photograph of Horsetail Fall in Yosemite National Park, California. (It’s not of any astronomical significance, however, except that it’s on Planet Earth.)
Star trails above the Annapurna mountain range captured from base camp in the Annapurna Conservation Area in Nepal, 4,130 metres above sea level. The long exposure reveals the stars moving across the sky as the Earth rotates, their light trails reflected in the lake.
Annapurna is a section of the Himalayas in north-central Nepal that includes 8,091 m (26,545 ft) Annapurna I, thirteen additional peaks over 7,000 m and sixteen more over 6,000 m.
Star Trails in the Blue Mountains taken with a Canon 40D DSLR from the Earth. As Earth rotates during the 30-minute exposure of this photograph the stars make trails around the sky’s south pole. Taken in Australia, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two neighbouring galaxies, appear as faint blurs in the sky. An equivalent photograph taken from Britain would show Polaris (the Pole Star) at the centre of the star trails. Photographer Ted Dobosz won the ‘Earth and Space’ category, Astronomy photographer of the year, 2009.
And for believers in real interplanetary space travel...
...Starship Enterprise navigates using Pulsars.
A group of scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany,
announced that they had developed a way to navigate during voyages across the universe, using stars known as pulsars.
“Beam me up, Scotty!”