PS, I did not write the photo commentary.  I should have put it in italics.   But this mouse acts funny when you try to select a block of text.

The commentary came from NASA, at the link.

Plus, I am unable to change the size (I use drag and drop, which essentially moves the URL of the photo, I believe).  Ideas?

Sea Ice and Icebergs off East Antarctica

October 23, 2011

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76197

Though it is all composed of frozen water, ice is hardly uniform. On October 7, 2011, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this image of a variety of ice types off the coast of East Antarctica.

Brilliant white ice fills the right half of this image. It is fast ice, and derives its name from the fact that it holds fast to the shore. This ice is thick enough to completely hide the underlying seawater, hence its brilliant white color.

Trapped within the fast ice, and stuck along the edge of it, are icebergs. Icebergs form by calving off ice shelves—thick slabs of ice attached to the coast. Ice shelves can range in thickness from tens to hundreds of meters, and the icebergs that calve off of them can tower over nearby sea ice. One iceberg, drenched with meltwater, has toppled and shattered (image upper right). The water-saturated ice leaves a blue tinge.

The icebergs along the edge of the fast ice are likely grounded on the shallow sea floor, and their presence may help hold the fast ice in place.

Farther out to sea is pack ice that drifts with winds and currents. Much thinner than the fast ice, the translucent pack ice appears in shades of blue-gray.

The pack ice includes some newly formed sea ice. As seawater starts to freeze, it forms tiny crystals known as frazil(image center). Although the individual crystals are only millimeters across, enough of them assembled together are visible from space. Constantly moved by ocean currents, frazil often appears in delicate swirls. Frazil crystals can coalesce into thin sheets of ice known as nilas (image top). Sheets of nilas often slide over each other, eventually merging into thicker layers of ice.

1. References

2. Scott, M. (2009, April 20). Sea ice. Earth Observatory. Accessed October 21, 2011.

3. State of the Cryosphere. (2010, October 20). Ice shelves. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed October 21, 2011.

Ooo, you saw the crepuscular ray photo.  Isn't that neat?  What a trip those astronauts must always have :3

My family still calls them G_d Beams

Have you ever tried google Earth or Google Mars?  For those who like exploring, it can be quite fun.  You can even spy on your neighbour's yard ;3 and see some pretty strange things...

Discover Magazine has some blogs that I really like visiting to get my science fix:  Bad Astronomy for Astronomy and Cosmic Variance for my Physics hit.

Industrial Light & Magic, eat your heart out

These things were reported by pilots for decades and not officially recognized by the scientific establishment until very recently.  I never knew there were Fae above the clouds as well

Totally cool event brought to me and you courtesy of capitalism (pbui). These scientists get PAID to watch these nifty things

When delving deeper into the crack, though, they found out the real cause; nature has quite a sense of humour

One of my favourite cartoons as a kid...I was self-referential from a young age :3

I made this little video back in 2008 from NASA's website of satellite pictures.  I love the images, particularly the one from Australia that looks like a Chinese painting...

Wow,wow, wow!

I subscribe to the National Geographic Youtube site and this was sent out today - enjoy!

That's a good one, even with the sound broken on my Mac!

I like looking at NASA's astronomy picture of the day
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

and the earth observatory pics - this is the volcano El Hierro
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/

The Black Forest (Germany) in the moon light.

Not a satellite photo but beautiful none the less....

I had the opportunity to walk in an old growth redwood forest just north of San Francisco California - Muir Woods National Monument - I loved this sign...

shhh...

can you hear her.

They don't have to be satellite photos.  Sometimes I just like to look a nice pictures of nature.  I would love see some of Muskoka.  You had a lovely one under another thread, I don't remember which one it was now.

I need a nice picture now.  I have made many photographs in my day, all on film though.  So here is one I found:

Location: Brandenburg, Germany.  

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bild-791840-271653.html

From a series of photos of Lonely Places, by Aaron Hobson / Cinemascapist

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,799587,00.html

 Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave, France

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inverallochy, Scotland 

Here is an attractive one from NASA:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76534&src=eoa-iotd

The limb of the Earth is a work of beauty and a gift to science. When observed from space, the layers of the atmosphere remind us of the fragility of the cocoon that shelters life. That same view also allows scientists to detect the gases and particles that make up the different layers of our atmosphere. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured a bit of both in this digital photograph from July 31, 2011. They threw in the Moon as an extra gift.

Closest to Earth’s surface, the orange-red glow reveals the troposphere—the lowest, densest layer of atmosphere, and the one we live within. A brown transitional layer marks the upper edge of the troposphere, known as the tropopause. A milky white and gray layer rests above that, likely a slice of the stratosphere with perhaps some noctilucent clouds in the mix. The upper reaches of the atmosphere—the mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere—fade from shades of blue to the blackness of space.

The different colors occur because the dominant gases and particles in each layer act as prisms, filtering out certain colors of light. Instruments carried on satellites and on craft such as the space shuttle have allowed scientists to decipher characteristics of the ozone layer and the climate-altering effects of aerosols.

A thin crescent of the Moon is illuminated by the Sun from below the horizon of the Earth. Though the Moon is more than 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) away, the perspective from the camera makes it appear to be part of our atmosphere.

These clouds look kind of interesting.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76621&src=eoa-iotd

As citizens of northern countries ponder sculpted snow and ice, or icings for baked goods, the summer skies over the southern oceans offered their own vision in white in November 2011. The brush strokes of bright holiday swirls were made by winds and atmospheric eddies moving over the far southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.

The natural-color image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on November 30, 2011. According to Patrick Minnis, a cloud expert at NASA’s Langley Research Center, there are at least three layers of clouds in the image.

The lowest layer is a marine stratus (stratocumulus) deck that covers the lower left two-thirds of the image. “The clouds look like whipped, mashed potatoes with swirls and bright peaks,” Minnis said. “The bright peaks indicate glaciation—freezing of the super-cooled cloud droplets. The swirls are reflective of eddies in the low-level wind fields.”

Just above (or perhaps continuous with) the marine layer, parallel wave patterns mark a brighter layer of stratus clouds that cover the other third of scene. Above it all, in the upper right quadrant, a high cirrus cloud throws shadows on the clouds below.

Tom Arnold, an atmospheric scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained that marine stratus clouds can form (and persist) where there is a meeting between a cold ocean surface, some wind, and a strong temperature inversion at the top of the atmospheric boundary layer (about 2,000 to 3000 feet). “The cold ocean cools and moistens the low level air, making the low cloud base possible,” Arnold noted. “The wind helps lift the air, and the temperature inversion acts a kind of cap on the cloud layer, preventing much vertical mixing with the warmer, drier, and more stable air immediately above the boundary layer.”

The temperature inversion layer is a product of a large area of high pressure that causes air to slowly sink, Arnold added. The sinking air compresses the air—and thus warms and drys it—forming the temperature inversion layer over the top of the colder ocean-cooled air.

There are some phenomenal illusion photographs out there ...

click here for more

COOL!

Stormy skies in Alabama, tornado country right now.

http://media.al.com/spotnews/photo/weather-stand-alone-jpg-1c1f27b8dddb3...

Coast of Namibia

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=77287&src=nha

Explanation from link:

Pale green patterns tinted the water along the Namibian coast in late February 2012. But unlike other bright hues that occasionally show up in the ocean, these colors didn’t result from a phytoplankton bloom.

Scientists have long known that hydrogen sulfide gas is emitted periodically along the Namibian coast. Ocean currents carry oxygen-poor water to the region, and chemical and biological processes can deplete what little oxygen is available. The sediments in the local seafloor are also rich with organic matter. When organic matter decays in an oxygen-poor environment, hydrogen sulfide emissions can result.

Before the satellite era, residents of the region could detect the hydrogen sulfide emissions thanks to the pervasive rotten-egg smell. But satellites’ “eyes in the sky” have shown just how big and long-lasting the emission events can be.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on February 29, 2012. The pale-hued surface waters snake along the shore of the Namib Desert, stretching roughly 150 kilometers (90 miles).

The milky-green colors along Namibia’s coast indicate high concentrations of sulfur and low concentrations of oxygen. Episodes like this aren’t just colorful, they are actually toxic to local marine organisms. Fish die in the low-oxygen water; however, what is deadly for the fish can be good for birds that feed on their carcasses. Likewise, lobsters crawling onto shore to escape the toxic seawater can make meals for locals. And some species of foraminifera—tiny shelled marine organisms—actually thrive in the oxygen-poor sea floor sediments off the Namibian coast.

Rare snowfall in Jerusalem, showing the Dome of the Rock mosque, on the Temple Mount

 http://www.buzzfeed.com/gavon/its-snowing-in-jerusalem

Notilucent clouds are pretty ephemeral wispy clouds that are the highest clouds in our atmosphere, some 70 km up (most of our weather happens within 0-20 km up)...they are only visible after the sun sets and at our latitudes (50-70 degrees N or S of the equator)

They are made of ice crystals...

And it has just been 'discovered' that these ice crystals form around meteor dust...which are bits of the primordial solar system, our nursery*, our birthplace...

There's something poetic aboot that...

* i read a funny article that 'determined' that the core of our Earth wasn't formed by the Earth but, rather, was borrowed from the many collisions with various asteroids which already had cores...so Earth is a PARASITIC VAMPIRE!  Damn :3