Our little home

NASA recently released an image, made up of photos taken over a period of 8 days, of our planet, being the most detailed yet.(Above)

To compare we have a few other images taken through the years by humans.

The first, in 1946 by a German V2 Rocket.

The second is the well know, 'Earthrise', a classic photo of the earth rising from the moon's horizon. This was captured during an Apollo 8 mission during 1968.

Thirdly we have a 1972 photo, labelled 'The Marble', due to the globe resembling a marble. This was taken by astronauts during a 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

What makes the 2010 image spectacular is that is so detailed and that it is compiled from the best, cloudless images over a 8 day period. This ensures more of the earth is visible than hidden by clouds.

Then there is a picture taken during 1990 by the famed Voyager spacecraft as it traveled away from it's home planet.
The enhanced picture was taken some 5,9 million kilometres away from earth, and shows earth as a tiny blue dot. Carl Sagan (one of my childhood idols) famously commented on the photo-'Look again at the dot. That's here. That's home. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who has ever was, lived out their lives.'

For me that sums up how fragile our existence is. It is pretty much all we have, and yet we do not take the care of the planet we need to.

And Lastly, for those of you who don't know, we need to set our morning alarms a bit earlier. This is due to the 8,8 magnitude earthquake in ?Chile, shifting the earth's axis by a gigantic 7cm. For those who like to make every bit of time count, we will lose a breath-taking 1,26 millionth of a second.
Kinda not even worth waking up and going to work is it?

Below is a series of photos, imaged together, of our fragile home at night.

Saturn's new ring

For those of us who are interested in astronomy, it was reported by NASA that The Spitzer Telescope has recently discovered the largest ring around Saturn, at the far edges of it's planetary system.(about 5,95 million kilometres from the planet).

The ring, consisting of a combination of ice and dust particles, has not been visible to other telescopes as it is diffused and does not reflect enough visible ligh. The Spitzer, however, views the universe in infared and because the ring glows with thermal radiation, this telepscope was able to detect it. It is estimated this ring has a width of some 11,9 million kilometres. It is so huge, that it would be able to accomodate 1 billion Earths.

Up until now, only seven major rings were known, imaginately name A-E. In addition there are a number of fainter rings.
One of Saturn's moons, Phoebe, orbits within this new rings and orbits the same direction as the ring. This is the opposite direction to the other rings and most of Saturn's other moons, including Iaptus.

Further information is that The Spitzer Telescope was launched in 2003 and orbits around the Sun. It is currently some 106,2 million kilometres from Earth.