In space, no one can hear you say "cheese".

September 21, 2006 10:17 AM

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Over half a million photographs of Earth taken from orbit by astronauts, from 1961 through the present. The ability of the astronauts to rapidly identify interesting phenomena allows them to capture events as they occur, like volcanic eruptions, floods, and hurricanes, or take advantage of the angle of the sun to highlight specific features, like the pyramids or Mount Everest.
posted by Gamblor (14 comments total)

Most excellent. Thanks!
posted by Songdog at 10:59 AM on September 21, 2006

I can totally see my house from here!

Ok, not. And the skewed angle of many photos gives me vertigo. Guess I'll never be an astronaut. But it's still cool, Gamblor.
posted by emjaybee at 11:07 AM on September 21, 2006

Great post. Thank you.
posted by googly at 12:08 PM on September 21, 2006

That's amazing. Thanks for the link.
posted by raedyn at 12:14 PM on September 21, 2006

Oh wow, I actually can see my house in one of them. It's like Google Maps with a whole new freaky level of personal service. Beautiful stuff.
posted by aliasless at 12:23 PM on September 21, 2006

Yeah, this is fantastic, I almost feel like I'm up there looking down.. .
posted by mk1gti at 12:30 PM on September 21, 2006

That's entirely nifty Gamblor
posted by Smedleyman at 1:07 PM on September 21, 2006

Great post.
posted by winks007 at 1:35 PM on September 21, 2006

On the CLEVELAND VOLCANO page Gamblor linked, I clicked one of the Large Images to Request for Downloading and got this page where they gave me the ftp for the whole bag of goodies (700+ images, 1.74 GB): ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ Thanks, Gamblor!
posted by taosbat at 2:50 PM on September 21, 2006

If I could mark this as a favourite twice, I would.

That volcano picture is boggling.
posted by poweredbybeard at 4:10 PM on September 21, 2006

Great post, Gamblor. Bookmarked link, for future reference.
posted by paulsc at 4:18 PM on September 21, 2006

Wow. Amazing!

The Everest picture made me queasy, though. I think my animal hindbrain somehow recognized it and freaked the fuck out. That alone was pretty cool :)
posted by kalimac at 6:25 PM on September 21, 2006

This might be the space photo equivalent of putting your thumb over the lens.
posted by Gamblor at 7:22 PM on September 21, 2006

What's really nice is the use/reproduction policy. It's fairly unrestricted, which makes the super-high-res versions really useful.

I grabbed one image a while back, touched it up a bit (just cleaning up noise and adjusting levels), and printed out a pretty nice 3'x2' poster using Zazzle of a spot with lots of sentimental value for my girlfriend and I. Much better than trying to (illegally, I think) stitch together imagery from Google or Microsoft or whoever.
posted by whatnotever at 9:39 AM on September 22, 2006