MetaFilter posts tagged with satellite and science

Happy 40th anniversary, mankind.

sexyrobot — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:01:13 -0800

Moon Landing Tapes Found! All the videos you've seen of the first moon landing are crap. Remember, back in the day, video cameras and recorders were two different things. So it went like this: camera on moon sends footage to Australia, where it's recorded on tape (and then those tapes were lost), then downsized onto a smaller monitor, which is filmed by another video camera, uploaded to satellite, and disseminated around the world. America watches it on TV, cheers. Some of this footage is filmed off of a television onto 16mm film. This is what goes into the national archives. Crap. So, the original tapes have been found (spoiler: they never left Australia). So what, right? How good could they be, recorded back in the late 60's and all? Pretty darn good, apparently...seems recording heads were much better than the output available at the time (like playing a Blu-Ray disc on a B&W TV), and several recent projects have shown that it's possible to extract very high resolution data from these old analog tapes. How hi-rez? High enough to see Neil Armstrong's nipples get hard. (be sure to click on that picture) So when can we see this amazing footage? Probably soon.

Kadath in the Cold Waste

Artw — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:13:02 -0800

Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica UK and US researchers peice together the most detailed map of Antarctica yet, searching through years of data to find cloud free images.

September 2007 polar sea ice anomaly

sergeant sandwich — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:49:59 -0800

Video (8MB, MPEG) of arctic sea ice extent, recorded from January to September 2007. [other formats] This summer a dramatic decrease compared to previous years in the extent of the north pole ice cap was observed. Scientists are freaked out [bugmenot]. This summer, the Northwest Passage was open for a few weeks, allowing three ships to traverse it. This data was taken by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. Comparison with past years. More information here.

EU weather satelite unit

longsleeves — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:37:10 -0800

accurate weather forecasts...yes... Add your own sound effects.