Earth At Night

This satellite photo from NASA spans a 24-hour period showing the entire surface of the Earth in darkness. The lights obviously show the highest areas of concentration of civilization.

Note the Nile River delta, the Siberian Express railway route, the Australian coastal cities, and Africa, literally "the dark continent".

From Princeton's International Networks Archive, the old project of Jonathan Harris.

The Elegant Universe

Following my earlier post on Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I found that NOVA has put the entire 3-hour show The Elegant Universe on their website.

The show is full of different visual methods to visual strings, gravity, the scale of particles and multiple dimensions. Brian Greene really did a fantastic job with this show based on his book on the same name.

The Cosmic Calendar

This last December was the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan's death. One of his most popular episodes of Cosmos was titled The Dragons of Eden where he first described his Cosmic Calendar. This website from discovery.com has a simple image showing the Cosmic Calendar as Carl described it. A few websites are selling posters of the Cosmic Calendar, like AllPosters.com.

The premise is that if you compress the entire history of the universe into a calendar year, homo sapiens only exist in the last 6 minutes, and the last second represents the last 400+ years of human history.

You can see Cosmos, and hear Carl describe it on YouTube here:

Bodies in the Solar System

Another great infographic on kokogiak.com showing the relative size of large objects (88 of them, at least over 200 miles in diameter) in our solar system. The largest (of course) being the sun down to the smallest, which is Davida, an asteroid 203 miles in diameter.

The Size of Our World

This is a simple, but great infographic. How big are the planets? How big is our Sun? How small is the Earth? The site shows five different images on increasingly larger scales.

No numbers or measurements. Easy to understand. So simple, yet SO informative.

The Size of Our World