Sky and Telescope - May 2018 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Mike Brake

Always wanted to see Earth from space? Now you can,
anytime, with a little help from NASA TV.
THE GREATEST SHOW on Earth is . . .

the Earth.
It rolls by from about 400 km (250
miles) up, 24/7/365, thanks to four
cameras NASA added to the International Space Station in 2014. Here
is the vast Paciﬁc Ocean, deep blue
beneath scattered, puffy clouds. There
are the Himalayas - which one is
Everest? - and, 45 minutes later, the
tangled coils of the Amazon.
You can soar over snow-white
Canada in January, then return in June
to see it brown and green with countless sparkling lakes. The continents and
seas loom up at a steady pace as the ISS
hurtles along at about 28,000 km/hour
(17,000 mph). Every 90 minutes there's
a sunset, with the horizon dimming
and the clouds turning purple, then
black. In another 45 there's a sunrise,
the illuminated cloudtops gleaming
impossibly bright.
Thanks to the ISS's orbit, the cameras eventually give us views of virtually
every part of our planet between the
poles. Log on and guess where you are:
Is that the Indian Ocean down there?
84

M AY 2 0 1 8 * S K Y & T E L E S C O P E

Look, here comes China! There's desolation: Is it the Sahara - or perhaps the
Australian Outback? Surely that broad
river is the Mississippi!
NASA claims it mounted those
cameras on the station's Columbus
module to test how well they'd stand
up to the harsh conditions of space.
Maybe so, but the real grip of this free
spectacle, accessible on computers and
smartphones anywhere anytime, arises
from the romance of spaceﬂight that
has enthralled us for 57 years now, ever
since those ﬁrst puny rockets lifted men
named Gagarin and Shepard toward the
stars. For baby boomers in particular,
the romance never quite died, even as
we matured and began to see spaceﬂight
as routine.
I could never have imagined as I sat
in an eighth-grade classroom on May 5,
1961, for Alan Shepard's brief lob shot,
that today approaching retirement I
can effectively hop aboard the ISS and
cruise around the globe, admiring it in
living color. It was unimaginable even
in the days of Mercury and Gemini and
Apollo. The ﬁlm from Ed White's Gem-

ini spacewalk gave us a glimpse, as did
video from later Shuttle missions. But
the really dramatic images came back to
us from the Voyagers and Cassinis and
Junos dispatched without humans to
the outer planets, and from the rovers
scurrying about on Mars.
As the show unreels we can also
silently remember those who died trying
to further our exploration of space -
the Apollo 1 and Soyuz 11 crews, and
those who didn't make it up on Challenger or down on Columbia. Some of
them had already seen that prospect
from space, and they were willing to
risk all to savor it again.
The ISS turns 20 this year. Some
evenings as I read a book I log onto the
live camera shot and glance up now and
then to see where we are, and in those
moments I am a passenger in spirit if
not reality, sharing the latest step in our
species' grandest adventure.
Check it out on NASA TV at https://
is.gd/ISSnasatv. It truly is the greatest
show on Earth.
¢ MIKE BRAKE, a journalist, is also observing and outreach coordinator for the
Oklahoma City Astronomy Club. He got
his first telescope at age 10 in 1957.

HIM A L AYAS: N ASA; L A K E POWELL: N ASA /E A RTHK A M.ORG; NORTHER N EUROPE: N ASA

Armchair Astronaut
http://www.is.gd/ISSnasatv http://www.is.gd/ISSnasatv
Sky and Telescope - May 2018

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