EARTH - ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN THE UNIVERSE.

EARTH - ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN THE UNIVERSE.

A Stunning Time-lapse photography of cities, aurora, lightning and other sights ass seen from the International Space Station orbiting the earth.

All of us live on earth daily, without giving much thought to where we are and how fragile a speck of dust we are in the vastness of the universe   This short video, compliments of NASA, gives us a space view of earth and will stimulate your imagination.    

Can you imagine, what it would be like to have a similar space view of other planets.   That will not be too far in the distant future.  NASA is already preparing for landing human's on Mars and our Moon over the next decade and a half.

How amazing is our sun.

The image is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and shows half million mile long, whip-like solar filament, which is a cooler cloud of material that held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces.  extending over half a million miles in a long arc above the sun’s surface.

It is 109 times larger than earth.  You could put about 1 million earth's inside the sun. But if you could crush the earth into granules, you could fit approximately 1.3 million earths into the sun. 

There is so much pressure and heat in the core of the Sun that nuclear fusion takes place: hydrogen is changed to helium.   Nuclear fusion creates heat and photons (light). The sun's surface is about 6,000 Kelvin, which is 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (5,726 degrees Celsius). The amount of solar heat and light is enough to light up Earth's days and keep our planet warm enough to support life.

The Tarantula Nebula

As seen by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, it is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is one of our neighboring galaxies about 170,000 light-years away from Earth and is about 650 light-years in diameter. 

One of the brightest known nebula's, it containing numerous clouds of dust and gas and two bright star clusters.

The energy coming from it is center accounts for the brightness of the Nebula.  According to astronomers, the nebula is so bright that if it were only 1,000 light-years from Earth, it would cast a shadow the planets of our solar system.

Panorama view of Tarantula Nebula

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured this panoramic view of the Tarantula nebula.   The bright area is called "30 Doradus" and is considered to be a star-forming region. The differing colors between the two photo's is because of the use of certain filters Hubble used in the photo on the left.    The green areas would normally appear red.   

The vastness of space is mind boggling.

It is mind boggling indeed, when you consider that this photo is of a body that is 650 light years from side to side.  According to metric-conversions.org that works out to be 3,821,106,601,811,465 miles in diameter.   As you can see, it's hard to even visualize the vastness of this distance.  This is contained in a larger galaxy.  Our own milky way galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter which is 587,862,554,124,840,832 miles, or 587.9 quadrillion miles.    

Above is another photo captured by astronomer Dr. Robert Fosbury of the
European Space Agency, using 100 photo's taken with special filters
and merged using a special program and several computers. 

Galaxies similar to the Milky Way.

This picture shows four galaxies which look similar to the Milky Way,  the closest being 55 million light years away.  

• NGC 3953 (top left) is 55 million light years away and 95000 light years in diameter.
• NGC 7723 (top right) is 80 million light years away with a diameter of 90000 light years.
• NGC 5970 (bottom left) is 105 million light years away and 85000 light years in diameter.
• NGC 7329 (bottom right is even further at a distance of 140 million light years but it is larger with a diameter of 140000 light years.

The nearest Galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda which is 2.5 million light years away.