Outer Space Stuff

I follow this dude on twitter. His name is Douglas Wheelock and he's an astronaut presently aboard the international space station. Here he is in his spacesuit. Anyway, he published a bunch of nice pictures on twitter (astro_wheels) and my dad sent me an email letting me know about them. So, I figured I'd make my Monday post about pictures from space. Interesting tidbit==> I guess that the International Space Station has only had internet access for about half a year now.  I used his comments as the captions on the photographs so you know a little about what you're looking at since the Earth looks way different from outer space.

Greek Islands on a clear night during a flight over Europe. Athens shines
brightly along the Mediterranean Sea.

This is Mystery Island near Madagascar.

Northern Lights in the distance in one of the finest nights over Europe. You can
see the Strait of Dover, a dazzling Paris, and a little fog over the western part
of England, particularly over London.

Of all the places of our beautiful planet, few can rival the beauty and richness of
the Bahamas. In this photo you can see his ship against the background of all
the color.



This is some peak in the Andes Mountains in South America. He didn't know
which peak it was.



This is a beautiful Atoll in the Pacific Ocean approximately 1930 km south of
Honolulu.

This is a night view of the River Nile, stretching like a snake through Egypt to the
Mediterranean Sea and Cairo located in the delta.

Other cool facts: They travel at a speed of 28,163 kilometers per hour in the International Space Station (around 8 kilometers per second). This means that they make one revolution of the Earth every 90 minutes and watch sunsets and sunrises every 45 minutes.  This is a fancy way of saying that fully half of the journey spent on the ISS is spent in darkness.

Also on another interesting note on March 28th, scientists observed the largest explosion in the universe.  Here's the link to the article.  In short, a huge star was witnessed being pulled apart by a black hole that resulted in an incredible light show visible billions of light years away.


Illustration of star being torn apart by black hole.

I guess this explosion was much larger than a gamma ray burst. I can't wait 'til Dr. Michio Kaku does a television special on this.