APOD 2.4

For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Home From Above, uploaded on November 15, 2010.  It is a picture of an astronaut looking down on Earth, and the the picture shows the Earth out the windows of the spacecraft.  The image was taken in late September by Dr. Dyson, who used to be a lead vocalist in the band Max Q.


Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson is about 350 kilometers in The International Space Station, or the ISS. The picture was taken through the ISS's Cupola window bay. The ISS was high enough up above Earth that the surface of the Earth appears to be curved.  Usually, there could be something blocking the view of the horizon, which is why the curvature of the Earth isn't very pronounced.  The moon's curvature, on the other hand, can be seen from the Earth easily because it has a smaller diameter, making the curvature more pronounced.  In the picture, through the windows, the Earth appears to be blue and white.  The white being seen is Earth's complex cloud structure, and the blue is the oceans that inhabit the Earth.  The space station is capable of orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes.  People living below the ISS are able to look back toward it, seeing a bright light drifting overhead right after sunset.  Telescopes use individual frames to construct composite images, and can resolve the overall structure of the space station.