Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts

October 24 – First Planetary Selfie

Posted October 24, 2018

I love David Brin's "uplift universe" books.
I often enjoy science fiction, and in far-flung tales of galactic proportions, brimming full of all manner of aliens, all people feel kinship with one another. We're not just all humans, we're all Earthlings, and some sci-fi has humans gallivanting around the galaxy with technologically-savvy chimpanzees and dolphins!

So for Earthling humans to take a photo of the Earth - I'm going to call that the biggest selfie ever!

In order to capture even a substantial fraction of the Earth in one photo - and especially in order to capture the Earth's curvature - you have to take a photo from outer space.

And today is the anniversary of the first from-outer-space selfies. 

On this date in 1946, a V-2 rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico reached at maximum altitude of 65 miles. And the DeVry 35-mm black-and-white motion picture camera attached to the rocket managed to take this famous photo of the Earth from space: 


Of course, humans have taken loads more and better photos of Earth from space since then. Here are a few gorgeous ones:



To see a series of photos as the Moon crossed
the dazzling Earth, check out this YouTube video.
This doesn't look like a photo of Earth - but Earth is an
identifiable dot almost hidden by one of Saturn's rings.


Of course, there are those classic Earth-from-Moon pix!
And you don't have to have a national space program to take photos of Earth from space! This school and this father-and-son team both launched iPhones to space with weather balloons.



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September 16 – International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer

Posted on September 16, 2017

Do you know about the ozone layer?

This thin layer of gas protects our planet - well, let's face it, what I really mean to say is that it protects the living things on our planet - from the harmful parts of the Sun's radiation.

The Sun makes all of life on Earth possible - we count on it for
light and warmth and for the crucial starting energy of most food chains.

But the Sun also pours out more energetic forms of radiation that are
harmful to life. Ultraviolet radiation (UVR) causes sunburns and skin cancer,
and it is the ozone layer that generally protects us from the brunt of UVR.

In other words, the ozone layer protects people from speedy sunburns and elevated rates of skin cancer - but it also protects humans and indeed all of life!!! - from dying out!

It's been 30 years since the Montreal Protocol, an agreement made by 193 countries to outlaw certain human-made chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer. These chemicals, CFCs, were commonly used in aerosol spray cans.

When some scientists first pointed out the dangers of CFCs, some people pooh-poohed them. They thought it was more important to keep our spray cans than to think about some far-off danger that they weren't sure even existed.

Luckily, scientists kept working on the theory of the CFC danger, and by 1976, the U.S. National Academy of Science concluded that CFCs and other human-made chemicals posed a credible threat. A few countries, including the U.S., moved to ban CFCs in aerosol cans. By 1985, a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was discovered. And just two years later, nations met to discuss a larger, hopefully worldwide CFC ban - the Montreal Protocol I mentioned above.

The ban went into effect in 1989, and ozone levels stabilized in the mid-1990s and began to increase again in the 2000s. Recovery is hopefully going to continue, and scientists hope that even the Antarctic hole is going to close up by 2075.

Because of this success, some people call the Montreal Protocol the most successful international environmental agreement so far.



Let's do the same for climate change!!



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October 9 – Independence Day in Guayaquil, Ecuador

Posted on October 9, 2015

In Ecuador's fight to break free of its Spanish rulers, one city broke away before the others—and declared itself an independent city-state.

The good news is that this ousting of the Spanish authorities was almost bloodless. The Spaniards were arrested, not killed. Quite civilized – especially for the time.

That was October 9, 1820. Since then Guayaquil (which is Ecuador's largest city and most important port, but NOT its capital city) has been celebrating its own independence in October as well as the independence of the entire nation in August 10. Here are two photos from a recent Guayaquil Independence parade:




To learn more about Guayaquil, check out this recent post. 


The Equator in Ecuador

You probably know that the name Ecuador refers to the Equator, the imaginary line that circles the middle of the Earth.

That means that you can stand in a certain place in Ecuador and have one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and the other foot in the Southern Hemisphere.

Did you also know that the Earth bulges outward a bit in the center? That means that the Equator is just a bit farther away from the center of the Earth than places north and south of the Equator. In other words, Earth is not a perfect sphere, but is instead an “oblate spheroid.”

This diagram shows what an oblate spheroid is.
Of course, Earth's middle bulge isn't NEARLY as
exaggerated as this one!

\Way back in the late 1600s, Isaac Newton suggested that Earth would be an oblate spheroid – a bit squashed at the poles and a bit swollen at the equator. He wasn't able to accurately measure and check his hypothesis, but it turns out that the difference is about 13 miles (21 km). Sounds like a lot, but of course this difference is swamped by the size of the Earth, which has a diameter of almost 8,000 miles (more than 12,000 km). That's why our planet looks pretty darned round from space.

Still, Ecuador's highest mountain, Chimborazo, is the farthest point on the Earth's surface from the Earth's center. It's height of 20,564 feet – and, don't get me wrong! That's high! That's higher than the highest peak in all of North America, Denali! – still doesn't even get it into the highest 100 elevations in the world. BUT, when you add those 13 miles of the equatorial bulge – bam! Chimborazo is the record holder!



Interestingly enough, although Spanish is the official language of Ecuador, and Ecuador is Spanish for “Equator,” people in Ecuador don't normally call the Equator by their country's name. Too confusing, I'm sure! Instead, they call it “Middle of the World,” or Mitad del Mundo.

At the Mitad del Mundo monument in Quito, people can climb to the top and get a great vista of both hemispheres...But, it turns out, the monument isn't actually built on the Equator! A mistake was made in 1982, when the monument was being constructed, and our current technology is able to tell us in no uncertain terms that the actual Equator is about 100 meters (300 feet) away from the monument!

Well...that's okay! Twice the photo ops, right? People get their photo taken straddling the false, 1982-era Equator...



...and the actual Equator.


And you know what's cool? You can walk along the real Equator and see a bunch of demos and experiments that show the effects of being exactly on the Equator.



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