A few days back, this was on Astronomy Pic of the Day.
From the International Space Station as it travels around your planet.
It is not CGI!
If you are every wondering where the ISS is, click HERE. I used that when I set up an antenna and Yaesu hand-held radio (a reader here sent me) in order pick up the ISS as it passed over.
Wow. The view of that lightning underneath the storm clouds is pretty cool. It always looks cool from overhead when you’re in an airplane flying over it, but this is 100x cooler.
In the still photo before launching the video, that appears to be the Italian peninsula (upside down, well lit) in the foreground. Very cool.
Is that the smoke from the Sistine chapel in the center?
The Chicken
Agreed – the lightning strikes are way cool.
Once again, I have to wonder how anyone can look at something like this and then continue to doubt the existence of God?
The shimmering sheets of aurora seen from above look really nice.
One question – what does “CGI” refer to? In my world (software development) it stands for a somewhat outmoded way of implementing an HTTP (web) server. But that doesn’t seem to fit here :)
@JonPatrick:
Computer
Generated
Image
JonPatrick:
People colloquially use it to mean “computer graphics,” though technically it should just be “CG.”
Very awe-inspiring video, though I ended up muting the melodramatic soundtrack.
The lightning was gorgeous, but when the Northern Lights started, it made me cry. So beautiful. God is so good. And yet all that is the light coming off of Earth’s “shields,” so to speak, so it’s both beautiful and lifesaving to all of us on Earth. Amazing.
I have been a “space junkie” since my teen years and followed the entire manned space program, from Mercury through Project Apollo to the ISS. When you read the autobiographies and accounts written by the men who made history, you are struck by the profound spiritual effect it had on them, especially the astronauts who made it to the moon. Virtually every single one was a believer whose faith was strengthened by the experience. Even the ground crew personnel were affected. Gene Kranz, the well-known flight director of the white team, was a daily communicant, as were others. So much for “men of science” having to be skeptics, non-believers, agnostics or atheists!
Looking thru microscopes will also make one a believer!
“The lightning was gorgeous, but when the Northern Lights started, it made me cry. So beautiful. God is so good. And yet all that is the light coming off of Earth’s “shields,” so to speak, so it’s both beautiful and lifesaving to all of us on Earth. Amazing.”
And witless men that we are, we are working very hard to make sure that no praise of God will, henceforth, be permitted, except behind closed doors, when even the very structure of creation demand that Alleluias ring forth.
Someone once pointed out that it was easier for God to create and sustain the entire universe (think about that) than to deal with man, because the universe does what God tells it to do. As fearful, awful, as these phenomena are, a man’s free will is even more fearful to contemplate.
The Chicken