On Sunday, January 07, 2018, the residents of Aïn Séfra, a small town in Algeria, experienced a rare phenomenon: snow in Sahara, the world’s hottest desert. In the video below, published by National Geographic, snow-dusted the desert’s sandy dunes. With temperatures touching 33.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 °C), this white blanket stayed briefly through the morning before melting away. However, a few residents found the opportunity to enjoy some winter fun.
This is so cool! With this tool, called “Earth Wind Map”, an animated map of global wind, weather, and ocean conditions, you can see current wind speeds all over the Earth, in real time!
On January 4, 2018, NASA has published an amazing GeoColor (see notes 1) image of the so-called “Bomb Cyclone”, a very powerful storm off the East coast of the United States. It was taken from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) GOES-16 satellite (previously known as GOES-R) (see notes 2).
Every year, there are two Equinoxes (around March 20 and September 23) and two Solstices (on about June 21 and December 21). Spring and autumn start with an equinox – daylight, and nighttime are of approximately equal duration all over the Earth during Equinoxes. Winter and summer start with a solstice – daylight time is the longest of the year during the summer solstice, and obviously, the night time is the longest during the winter solstice.
The video below, published by NASA Earth Observatory, is a time-lapse from geosynchronous orbit (see notes 1) that shows the four changes of the seasons, related to the position of sunlight on the planet.
An amazing image showing both the Earth and Moon. The distance between our planet and its satellite is actually much more than many would conceptualize. It is 384,400 kilometers (about 239,000 miles) on average, but as usual, our brains cannot deal with such large numbers. Only seeing that distance makes us realize how far even the closest body in the solar system to us – and gives some clues about how big is our Solar system actually. What’s more, we’ve actually been there, humanity managed to cover that vast distance and walked on the moon!
Here are the top ten most beautiful Earth photos taken by the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2017. Which one is your favorite? Or if your favorite image was not listed here, please leave a comment below. To see all images taken from the International Space Station and published by NASA, visit Space Station Images.
For the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 17 lunar landing mission, NASA has published a website called “Apollo 17 in Real-time. The Last Mission to the Moon – A Real-time Journey through the Apollo 17 mission”. You can see the events in real-time either joining at 1 minute before the launch or in progress.
On the website apollo17.org, you can access over 300 hours of audio, over 22 hours of video, and over 4,200 photos, and relive every moment as it occurred in 1972.
The commander of Expedition 53 (the 53rd expedition to the International Space Station), NASA astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik has published a breathtakingly beautiful video on his Twitter account. The video shows the International Space Station (ISS) night pass from Seattle down to Baja. What’s more, you can even see a meteor in the video, at the 30th second!
On Sunday, December 3, there was a Supermoon, the Moon was at its closest point (for 2017) to Earth while it was also a full moon. A series of nighttime photos were taken by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Paolo Nespoli to create this time-lapse of the Earth as seen from the International Space Station and the 2017 Supermoon rising above the horizon.
Randy “Komrade” Bresnik (see notes 1), the commander of Expedition 53 (the 53rd expedition to the International Space Station) has published an HD video of their spacewalk (Expedition 53 Spacewalk). Watch the GoPro footage below: