You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Shuttle in Colorful Bands of Atmosphere

Text taken from spaceflight.nasa.gov: Though astronauts and cosmonauts often encounter striking scenes of Earth’s limb, this very unique image, part of a series over Earth’s colorful horizon, has the added feature of a silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour. The image was photographed by an Expedition 22 crew member prior to STS-130 rendezvous and docking operations with the International Space Station. Docking occurred at 11:06 p.m. (CST) on Feb. 9, 2010. The orbital outpost was at 46.9 south latitude and 80.5 west longitude, over the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Chile with an altitude of 183 nautical miles when the image was recorded. The orange layer is the troposphere, where all of the weather and clouds which we typically watch and experience are generated and contained. This orange layer gives way to the whitish Stratosphere and then into the Mesosphere. In some frames the black color is part of a window frame rather than the blackness of space.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Earth, Manned Spaceflight, Spacecraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Shuttle in Colorful Bands of Atmosphere”

  1. bridal shower Says:
    April 5th, 2011 at 12:22 am

    great image and the sad part is that those images will be nothing but a fond memory a couple of years from now when the space shuttle is retired.

  2. Travis Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 7:14 am

    What an awesome photograph. I hope Sir Richard Branson’s “spaceflight for the rest of us” becomes viable. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to look down on the earth sometime in their life. My first airplane ride many years ago was awesome. A space flight? I hope so.

  3. Semper Says:
    April 7th, 2011 at 5:28 pm

    Beautiful photo….to bad NASA is ending the shuttle programs.

  4. Lavender Says:
    April 14th, 2011 at 12:03 pm

    That’s an amazing photo! It would be an incredible experience to view a world from that distance… I imagine it would be a mixture of awe inspiring humility and apprehension to be out so far and feel so small, like a speck of dust, in the vastness of it all.

    I imagine flying in a jumbo jet would become uneventful after a trip into space. Living on a moon station would be cool though, I think.

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