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If you have not noticed, our planet is beautiful.
Of course, we have oceans, clouds, forests, mountains, lakes, deserts, polar ice caps, and and. This is obvious. But when you see the Earth of space, well, its beauty is so convincing that if I saw it myself, I have no doubt that I would be moved beyond the capacity of words.
And then there are his images that are not only of lushly carved art, but which are so surprising and unexpected that they become almost overwhelming.
That's what I felt the first time I noticed:
If I can mention George Takei: Oh myyyyyyy.
This is an image subsequently taken of Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometers (or VIIRS) on the satellite of the National Partnership for Suomi orbiting polar satellites (or simply for the Suomi Nuclear Power Plant). The satellite revolves around the Earth at an altitude of about 830 kilometers and uses its fleet of detectors to observe the land, sea and air to monitor the effects of climate change.
VIIRS has a detector called day / night band, or DNB, which is sensitive to visible light and near infrared. It is designed to work well in low light conditions so you can see the night clouds like moonlit clouds, city lights and dawn.
These are the last two that you see in this beautiful image. The lights of the city of the United States are down south, and the Great Lakes are highlighted by their lack of light. As your eyes head north, there are fewer lights in the city and Lake Winnipeg in Canada punctuates the darkness in the center left.
But then you come to the top and oh wow, yes. The aurora borealis dominates the view and even exceeds the vast waters of Hudson Bay.
The mysterious glow is painted in the luminous curves to the northwest that merge into the dairy swirls to the south, with a global glow that is part of the dawn and light of the ground. Even in monochrome, the view is clear.
What you see is the air itself above our heads excited by the sun. The sun's magnetic field accelerates the removal of subatomic particles by a solar wind that passes through the solar system. Some of them pass through the Earth and are swept by our own magnetic field, which directs them to the magnetic poles north and south, near the geographical poles. These particles then enter our atmosphere at high speed, hitting the air molecules like bullets. The electrons are blown by the impact and, when they recombine with the parent atoms, they emit light.
Normally, it would be an epic display of colors; each molecule and each atom emits specific colors of light while their electrons nestle at home; green and red glowing oxygen, red, blue and violet nitrogen. But the DNB sees light in a wide range of colors and not individually. So we only draw this monochrome grayscale (usually, but misleading, called "black and white"). Again. It's incredibly charming.
After being overwhelmed by beauty, I began to look at the lights of the city and have fun looking for familiar landmarks. Unfortunately, Colorado is not on this picture, so I could not find my own home, but the Chicago / Minneapolis / Kansas City triangle caught my eye. St. Louis was cut a little down (and also, like, scrambled a bit by the clouds).
And then my eye wandered west, and I saw a strange glow of lumps … and I immediately knew where and what it was.
Or is North Dakota. If you scratch your head what gigantic city, which positively dominates all other cities of the image, is in a relatively sparsely populated state. Prepare yourself: it's not a city.
It's the excess of fractured natural gas that is burned.
Yes, you read correctly. So much fossil gas is extracted in North Dakota that for VIIRS only excess being burned is brighter than a big metropolitan city. It turns out that about a third of the gas extracted is burned this way, adding large amounts of CO2 to the air without doing anything. Spoiled in the air, we already pollute our atmosphere by adding 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That's enough to heat half a million homes.
I must say that this has greatly reduced the beauty of this image for me.
I certainly hope that in the coming years, we will get rid of the need to burn thousand-year-old plants, to leave them in the ground. And not only because it makes otherwise beautiful images of our ugly planet, but because it makes our planet ugly, and possibly unbearable.
I am therefore happy that Suomi-NPP is around and is watching our planet closely. Satellites like this are essential to our understanding of what we do for Earth, even if they reveal its amazing beauty.
Point to the lens cap for NASA Earth Observatory.
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