Tag Archives: Earth

“Riding Light” – Animation by Alphonse Swinehart

February 5th, 2015 | Space

Riding Light Vimeo

“Riding Light” is a new, beautiful animation by Alphonse Swinehart. In the 45-minute journey, you will travel with light on its way from the Sun to Jupiter. I love videos like this because they really help me gain a better appreciation for the scale of our Universe. If you watch light travel from Earth to Mars, for example, you will realize how difficult it will be to successfully complete a manned exploration mission to the red planet. There’s just so much emptiness between the planetary masses…

A word from the creators:

“In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I’ve taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually “sees” or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I’ve kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / aswinehart.com
Music: Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians”
Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / eighthblackbird.org

-RSB

All Of The Water On Earth

May 11th, 2012 | Space

The image above represents all of the water on the face of the Earth formed into a Moon-like sphere.  First of all, it looks pretty crazy to see the Earth without the oceans, pretty desolate actually.
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 And secondly, I expected all of the water to look like a LOT MORE WATER.

Here’s an excerpt from the USGS:

This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers).
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The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.

If you’d like to see how this water is distributed, check out the graph below:

I also expected that biological water would take up a bigger piece of the pie.

-RSB

[via TheFoxIsBlack]

Earth’s Flag & Beyond

March 26th, 2012 | Space

2020 - Earth's Flag

For some reason, creating a flag for Earth never really occurred to me, but it’s a great idea.  Reddit user thefrek made this series of flags for present-day Earth and also for our inevitable expansion – for the next 800 years!  I can support the white and blue world colors.  They seem appropriate.

Click on the images to get a description of the flag.

[nggallery id=8]

If anyone is inspired to create their own version of Earth’s flag, send it in, and we’ll post it.

-RSB

[via io9]

What Earth Would Look Like With Saturn’s Rings

March 21st, 2012 | Space

This is a video from YouTube User Roy Prol that demonstrates what Earth would look like with Saturn’s rings. He used 3d Max to create some pretty interesting (and apparently accurate) renderings of famous landscape photos from around the world.

The cities included:

  • Paris
  • Rio de Janeiro
  • Quito
  • Malmö
  • New York City
  • Ayers Rock
  • Madrid
  • Kuala Lumpur
  • Tehran
  • Cologne

-RSB

[via Kottke]