I enjoyed that ride. Thanks for the link Kuya. I tried hard to recognise where we were orbiting but no luck so far. Will just have to keep trying unless anyone knows? Did anyone else notice what looked to be some rather fine electrical storms? Love it.
Yeah it was much speeded up but the electric storms were fun, for that kind of volume of storms I thought it had to be somewhere in the tropics possibly Indonesia but it was very hard to tell. Given that it was the night side it was hard to make out any real features that might have given a clue, I find it hard even flying over Britain at night trying to get my bearings from the city lights
I worked it out, it's the US west coast Baja California, see from 16 seconds to 20 seconds on the right of the frame you can see teh Gulf of California, The ship is travelling North to south down the west coast and the storms are in or near the tropics. You need to turn the Earth upside down in Google Earth and then the contours become clear.
They just posted the full thing on dpreview http://www.dpreview.com/news/2011/11/14/MichaelKonigNASAvideo Taken with a Nikon D3s as a timelapse sequence of stills, the Aurora are amazing.
This is a real nice thread. Well worked out oss. Nice link. I spent some time taking a look at another link on that site called The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth Really interesting. You can actually download video clips and actual photographs. I'm still checking them out, it'll take some time but great fun. Even have city pics too.
What I found truly impressive about these timelapse sequences is that the night side shots were using the full dynamic range of the Nikon D3s you can tell because stars are visible above the horizon of the earth and this would be almost impossible to capture in the days of film before Digital as film just was not that sensitive and could not discern the range of tones from light to dark and retain detail at the same time, much as I love Canon camera's the Nikon is a truly impressive machine. You will note that the stars vanish when the ISS is on the daylight side of the planet as at that point even with 10 or more EV of dynamic range it is just not possible to correctly expose the highlights and get really dim objects like stars to show up as well. I am making a deliberate point for any conspiracy theorists out there who happen to stumble on our site and take the presence of stars in those night sequences as proof that we never landed on the moon, because the photos taken on the moon 40 years ago had no stars. Only people with little or no knowledge of photography and light were ever surprised by that fact and more so that they are unaware that slide film only has an EV (Exposure value) Dynamic range of about 5 f stops, in other words not even close to what modern technology is capable of. Each 1 EV is a doubling of the amount of light falling on the film or sensor 0 EV is very dark and 14 EV is pretty bright, remember the amount of light doubles with each 1 EV so 10 EV (10 EV with raw file processing) is a very large range of brightness.
I just took a look at that now too, it is really interesting, the "Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night" clip is really good, starts over Hong Kong and then at 8 to 12 seconds passes over the Phils then on to Malaysia then Australia
