This, and the recent timelapse video of Earth's atmosphere from GOES-16[0], made me realize just how a dynamic phenomenon clouds are. They look so much different at this timescale than when watching them real-time.
There is some very nice imagery in the "Loop of the Day" here [0]. It used to be from Himawari-8, but returning to it to post it here, I see they are now primarily showing data from GOES-16.
von Karmann vortices (e.g. [1]) are particularly nice.
Two things that stood out for me were: the view of the starry night sky (which I have not seen in decades, since moving to a metropolitan area); and the amount of traffic at sea (barring some stretches where they seem to have no company).
It also highlights how close the clouds are to the surface of the Earth. In everyday perception, at least to me, the clouds always seem very distant and cleanly separated from the surface. Here you can see they are actually very nearly connected to the surface, all part of one ecosystem against the backdrop of the distant universe.
One of the reasons I go camping is so that I can visit the stars. Some of the first questions that got me going in science was the idea that I could actually look up and see the stars around which other worlds rotated, and wondered if there was some alien kid looking back at me. Later when I realized the light was thousands if not millions of years "old" I thought, "Here I am looking at you alien kid, a million years from now." We bought an easy to transport Meade 90mm telescope to take with us camping.
To anyone who is interested, I highly recommend a pair of cheap 7x50 binoculars (easily $50 or less) for beginner stargazing.
The wider field of view, ease of use, and immersion with both eyes makes it really great for starting out, as compared to a telescope. There are also some great apps out there to help you know what you are looking at.
You may even see some pretty cool stuff from your backyard. Two of my favorites are the Andromeda Galaxy and the Pleiades.
What I appreciate most about this is that he just set up the camera and let the scene unfold without cutting away every two seconds, or worse, every just-long-enough-so-i'm-relaxing-and-starting-to-get-immersed-in-it-when-you're-suddenly-taking-it-away-from-me-I-hate-you-now seconds. I wish there were more videos like this one.
Another one I found recently is this drone video of Mt. Jefferson in Oregon during the eclipse.
About halfway through the video the caption says that he works a "4-8 shift", meaning s/he works from 4-8am and 4-8pm (according to the video). Why is it done this way?
That an interesting watch rotation to stand. At first I dreaded that one because you get less sleep. But the upside is that 0400-0800 is a quiet time aboard a ship, and 1600-2000 things are usually winding down as well.
And if you're standing that watch that means you're not standing port and starboard (i.e. 4 hours on 4 hours off) so, could be worse!
In the morning, usually setting things up for whatever operations are scheduled for the 0800-1200. In the evening, squaring things away from whatever we did that day and maybe prepping for night helo ops.
One of my favorite features of he Apple TV is the screensaver of flyovers in various cities across the globe. I’ll put in some ambient music and eventually the screen saver kicks in and I have a lovely ambient audio/visual experience for when I work. I’d love I if I could make my own playlist, or add to the default one, to add videos like this one. It’s truly mezmerizing to watch when taking a ten minute stretcher.
That is the channel for The World From Above. They are HD documentaries, a bit shorter than I prefer, done entirely from the air. They fly over a bunch of places, taking very nice footage, and narrate what you're seeing. You can just turn the volume down and provide your own soundtrack, but I like the narration.
There is another, similar, series that was made by a travel agent company, but I can't seem to find it. If you watch enough of then, YouTube may put it into the recommended list. Both of them are very good, well made, and terrible time sinks. You have been warned.
There's also Aerial America by the Smithsonian Channel. They're one hour narrated documentaries with exclusively aerial footage. One per state (they combined the Dakotas). I'm not even American and I bought the whole set on bluray.
I second that recommendation! Various european broadcasters shared that concept and produced a whole series that covers a lot of european countries. So far i watched them about germany ("Deutschland von oben"), france, italy and great britain.
The "weather", clouds and "stars"(night sky). Are two things I see most in this cool photo/video compilation... great to watch. The night sky on sea is stunning, becaus of reduced or no "light pollution". Good idea to actually use photos!
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[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/12/us/hurricane-...