The SunBreak » satellite

Watching Seattle Grow on Google’s Earth Engine

Michael van Baker — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:01:36 +0000

Google's new Earth Engine uses an archive of Landsat satellite images to create time-lapse videos of regions of the earth from space: cities, rain forests, glaciers, deserts, whatever you'd like to zoom in on. There's no embedding capability yet, so here's the link to Seattle's growth since 1984.

Visiting the Space Shuttle Trainer at the Museum of Flight (Photo Gallery)

Michael van Baker — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:15:32 +0000

If you go on the tour, you get to see inside both levels of the crew compartment. (Bring your iPod and listen to John Roderick sing "the crew compartment's / breaking up" for maximum chills.) But your general admission is enough to get you into the room with the full-scale space shuttle trainer, and into the payload bay, where you can pretend to be crushed by the satellite hanging above your head.

GOES-West Satellite’s Weather Imaging Goes South, Temporarily

Michael van Baker — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:28:21 +0000

NASA's GOES-West weather satellite (aka GOES 15 aka GOES-P) normally sits in geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles up over the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S.

UFOs Visit Seattle, Inspire Hilarious Commentary on YouTube

Michael van Baker — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:27:23 +0000

Thanks to KIRO's Twitter, we were alerted to GossipandGabber's YouTube video of the aliens "fucking landing." (Note: they don't land.) You see a rectangle "formed" by four blinking lights slowly move across the night sky, while the videographer calls to her friends, murmurs how exciting it is to have spotted a UFO, and says, "Holy shit, here comes another one."