Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. For the occasion, we are sharing this video, which was made nearly two years earlier in memory of the survivors of the Varzaqan earthquake and the Shinabad school incident.

This time, however, the focus is more directly on Earth itself—this unique planet and refuge of humanity, which we are destroying with our own hands through hostility and war. At the heart of such behaviour, the author argues, lies little more than competition to plunder and exploit natural resources ever more aggressively.

Watching the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes from Space

The first post of the new year is devoted to a beautiful film assembled from 17,520 images. The images were taken of Earth every half hour over the course of a year by a EUMETSAT meteorological satellite.

In the film, an entire solar year is compressed into 12 seconds. Roughly every three seconds therefore represents one terrestrial season, or, put another way, each second of the film corresponds to approximately one month.

The sequence begins on 19 September 2010, a few days before the autumn equinox. Exactly halfway through the film, at the six-second mark, the spring equinox can be seen across Earth as it appeared from space on the first day of Farvardin. The film ends upon reaching the autumn equinox of 2011.