An intimate tour... in 1080p... of Earth's most impressive landscapes...
as captured by astronauts with their digital cameras. Dr. Justin
Wilkinson from NASA's astronaut team describes the special places that
spacemen focus on whenever they get a moment.
We start with the
coast of Namibia in southwestern Africa, the very dry desert coast of
the Namib Desert. You can see a cloud band butting up against the shore
and some straight sand dunes in the lower left of the picture. Yeah
those are big red sand dunes that the astronauts say is one of the most
beautiful sites that you can get when you're flying.
Coming into
the view on the left is an impact crater right in the middle of the
picture, right about now and some wind streaks. We know where this area
is because it's a bit unique. We've got a major dune field coming into
the picture on the left there: the Oriental Sand Sea, as it's called in
French, and on the top is the Isawan Sand Sea.
This is the
island of Sicily with cloud over Mt. Etna, so you can't quite tell
there's a big volcano in the middle of the picture right now. And
there's the toe of the boot of Italy coming into the picture from the
left. See a good example of sun glint on the right with the sea
reflecting the sun.
This is the smooth east coast of the
Kamchatka peninsula again. As you move inland it gets even more striking
as a picture because of all the volcanoes on this peninsula and the
snowy mountains. There's a volcano just coming into the picture from the
top left there. You can see a knob-shaped feature.
Here is a
smaller finger of land in China sticking into the Pacific Ocean. In
winter you can see all the snow lower left. This is called the Qindoa P
eninsula and we recognize it. And again, the sun glint point moving
along the coast upper center.
In a very clear picture, the Zagros mountains with snow on them in Iran, in the country of Iran.
Here
we have the north coast of Australia and the gulf of Carpenteria and
some islands. The biggest island at the bottom of the screen there is
Groote island, which means the big island in Dutch.
When you
see a huge powerful feature like this and the astronauts do shoot them a
lot and we have had some detailed views looking right down the eye,
looking at the eyewall. In fact I seem to remember views of breaking
waves on the sea surface at the bottom of the eye. Amazing detail.
Look
at this neat picture of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the variation in
color? That's due to an almost a complete blockage of the circulation of
the lake by a trestle for a railroad that crosses from one side to the
other. It stops the circulation and things get a little bit saltier and
certainly saltier at the north end of the lake.
Here you see two
circles coming in to the top of the view now. These are either
volcanoes or effects from inside the earth producing circular features.
We think this is the Big Bend area of Texas.
This is an
interesting sideways view of the peninsula of Florida, with the Keys
stretching out into the lowest part of the picture there. And the
shallow seas around the Bahama Islands top right. And Cuba coming into
the picture lower right.
And this I believe is the coast of
Northern Chile in South America. It's a very straight coast, except for
that strange headland out to the right just disappearing. And so the
desert is the first part of the inland zone, and then you see much
blacker at the top of the picture the Andes Mountains with some many
dozens of volcanoes.
Here is a thunderhead. The typical look of
the thunderheads, the big rainstorms, that develop over the Amazon
Basin. And another one coming in top right. Here's an obviously a major
river. There's an even bigger one coming in on the right. That looks to
me like it could well be the Amazon River, with one of its big
tributaries on the left. And the flow would seem to be from the bottom
of the picture to the top.
