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jtotheizzoe:

What if the sun never set?

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station occasionally experience that very phenomenon, and it’s captured in the video above in all its beautiful oddness. Here’s how it works:

The ISS doesn’t travel around the Earth’s middle. Rather, it follows a near-polar orbit. As it flies along its tilted north-south path, orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, this orbit lets it see much more of the Earth beneath it. Occasionally, it happens to travel along the line between night and day, and that’s where this cool scene unfolds.

Along Earth’s “terminator” (the line between light and dark), if you looked out the window of the ISS you’d see the Sun dip in the sky, but climb again without setting.

In the video, the orbit begins east of London, then extends southward along the terminator until crossing near the South Pole. The ISS then orbits back up toward the north, hovering above the terminator in permanent daylight until it reaches a point just east of where it began.

The Earth’s terminator line:

(Video by NASACrewEarthObs)

laughingsquid:

Further Up Yonder

Time-Lapse Journey of the International Space Station Around Earth

propagandery:

animation of the dark side of Earth stitched together from new satellite images

This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

[via io9]

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