Astronomy

When the sun is directly overhead in Hawaii, it looks like a bad video game render

The sun is exactly overhead twice a year in Lahaina, Hawaii, once in May and once in July. Poles don’t cast shadows, giving the urban landscape an eerie appearance. Hawaii is the only state in the US where the sun’s rays are perpendicular to the surface of Earth. It’s called a subsolar point.

Via Boingboing

The Pale Blue Dot You might need to dust your laptop or desktop monitor to see this one clearly. You see a tiny dot in the photo above? In the middle of that light colored line? That is Earth, how it looks from the edge of the solar system. This famous photograph, that I discovered only today is called the Pale Blue Dot (actually it is the representation of earth in the photo that they are talking about here, but you get my drift).

Flickr has published two amazing high-def photos of earth from one of NASA’s earth observing satellite - Suomi NPP. The photos are created by joining several high def photos and joining them together, as explained here. Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth - Blue Marble 2012 Eastern Hemisphere - Blue Marble 2012 The original photo on the left of the western hemisphere is available on Flickr with a resolution of 8000x8000 or 64 megapixels!