Flyover

From Maggie's Farm, this time-lapse video from the International Space Station, showing the aurora borealis and a lot of lightning. It goes so fast, I could hardly tell what coastlines and cities I was seeing most of the time. It's funny how different a map looks when north isn't "up."

8 comments:

E Hines said...

Interesting how lit up the Nile and Israel were. And then there was the road to Baghdad.

Also, there seemed to be a lot of cloud cover. Not consistent with AGW.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Blogger seems to be incapable of processing my login today! I'm glad to see T99 can get in.

Eric: You're talking about on/about 2:20, yes? That's some pretty inhospitable country, except for Baghdad and the Mesopotamia region just around it. Not a lot of electricity there, either, although there is a Russian powerplant on the Euphrates that might be coming online in the next few years, depending on stability in the region. It's located at what used to be COP Dragon, now an ISF outpost.

E Hines said...

Grim, Yes, and the view of the same region just after, at around dawn (dusk?). It's true enough the area is undeveloped, but the areas just inland in Israel would be pretty inhospitable, too, were it not for the actual development that's gone on.

Some areas are harder to develop than others, and take more money and surface resources. I'm not sure if there's anything under the ground, but there's certainly no commerce to support living in the area between western Jordan and eastern Iraq.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

I never figured the whole of The Great Wall was lit up. Green Energy no doubt.

BillT said...

I've seen lightning from above before, but overflying the aurora? Beautiful!

Grim said...

RCL,

No doubt! I had a Chinese national defend China's energy policy to me earlier this week in just those terms. You'd have thought, to listen to her, that there wasn't a coal-fired plant in all of the Middle Kingdom.

Mark said...

Does anyone know what spectrum(s) this image was taken in? I would love to get some really high resolutio images of this type.

DL Sly said...

Mark, I saw this vid the first time on Space.com. They have high res wallpaper and pix of this in their respective galleries.
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