Tiny Blue Marble

[J-Sun]

I've referred to The Astronomy Picture of the Day more than once and I check out all of them but this one seemed especially worthy of passing on.

All the Water on Planet Earth.

You do sort of get the "70%" stuck in your head and, certainly, when you're looking out on the ocean (which I haven't done in far too long) it sure seems overpowering. But there's the analogy of the ball bearing (I can't remember the size to keep it in scale and can't find it on the net but, still...) where, if you breathe on it so that moisture condenses on the surface, that's equal to our atmosphere in relation to the rocky globe. Our oceans and air are just an almost non-existent thin film on top of a tiny rock circling an average fireball in a standard galaxy of "billyuns and billyuns" of galaxies. A drop of water and a puff of air separates us from Mars. A few degrees may separate us from runaway effects and Venus. It's an amazing juxtaposition of the stable and eternal and precarious and transient.

Anyway - cool pic.

[Huttman]

Thank you J-sun for the link. Very cool website, very enlightening picture.

[J-Sun]

Glad you enjoyed it.

[HareBrain]

Hmm, probably the world's most precious natural resource, and where does it all end up?

[Moonbat]

I used to check APOD daily to see if I could find new backgrounds for my PC,
But just checking back through the recent ones and I came across this

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120524.html

Which is quite interetsing, and relevant

[Metryq]

I think someone applied the "bump map" on the Earth model in the wrong phase. The shadows are all inverted, thus making the continental shelves and the continents appear to depress into the crust, rather than standing higher than the ocean floor.


Trelane: "I never have any fun!"

Father: "Stop that nonsense at once, or you'll not be permitted to make any more planets."

—STAR TREK, "The Squire of Gothos"