Beauty of Reality

Nothing beats the real thing ^^

Google unveils 3 Decades of Earth Timelapse

A picture is worth a thousand words.
A video is worth a thousand pictures.

I'll let the video speak for itself. Enjoy!

The Ultimate Virtual Earth Experience!

“94 percent of the world’s population is covered in this experience. 54 percent of the Earth’s land mass is covered. There are around 175 cities with full, 3D data, and over 600 ‘urban cores’ as well.” Google Earth turns all of this data into completely explorable, scalable 3D immersive worlds for the HTC Vive VR headset.

Read more about it in this article!

Cars Write Message to Space

13-year-old Stephanie sends a handwritten message to her astronaut dad on board the ISS with help from Hyundai:

Wanderers

An epic short film called "Wanderers" by Erik Wernquist:


Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

Words and voice by Carl Sagan:

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future.

Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.

Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

More Things in Heaven and Earth...

Lightning is a fascinating natural phenomenon, and recent research is giving us more insight into less commonly seen upper-atmospheric lightning phenomena such as Sprites, ELVES and Blue jets.



Shakespeare rings true once again in this quote from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Watch the Earth from orbit in real-time!

Anyone with an internet connection can now observe the Earth from space, live from the International Space Station!

The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment aboard the ISS was activated on April 30, 2014. The experiment includes several commercial HD video cameras mounted on the External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency's Columbus module.

Check out the streaming HDEV imagery with a real-time ISS location display. There are three cameras, one pointing forward, one backwards and one downwards. Note that when the ISS is on the night side of the Earth we see a black scene. When switching cameras or when the communications downlink is not available, we will see a gray scene. Otherwise, it's a glorious live HD video of our beautiful planet from space.

When I started Project Eden in 2011, I tried to use scientific facts and artistic imagination to visualize how the Earth looks from space. Now I'm so happy to be able to see the real thing, despite the limited resolution of the video stream.

Even though I don't know any of them, I'm very grateful to the people at NASA, ESA, the high-school students who participated in the HUNCH program  (High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware),  and whoever else is involved to make this experiment possible. Perhaps a higher perspective will make more of us appreciate our planet and environment better, realize we are all part of a bigger existence, and lessen the illusion that our individual agendas are as important as we make them out to be.

Enjoy your view!