Entries in home (20)
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without borders I am home
from orbit
without borders
I am home
Composite map of the world assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012.
Scientists unveiled an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.
Many satellites are equipped to look at Earth during the day, when they can observe our planet fully illuminated by the sun. With a new sensor aboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite launched last year, scientists now can observe Earth's atmosphere and surface during nighttime hours.
The new sensor, the day-night band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is sensitive enough to detect the nocturnal glow produced by Earth's atmosphere and the light from a single ship in the sea. Satellites in the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program have been making observations with low-light sensors for 40 years. But the VIIRS day-night band can better detect and resolve Earth's night lights.
The new, higher resolution composite image of Earth at night was released at a news conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. This and other VIIRS day-night band images are providing researchers with valuable data for a wide variety of previously unseen or poorly seen events.
"For all the reasons that we need to see Earth during the day, we also need to see Earth at night," said Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA's Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. "Unlike humans, the Earth never sleeps."
The day-night band observed Hurricane Sandy, illuminated by moonlight, making landfall over New Jersey on the evening of Oct. 29. Night images showed the widespread power outages that left millions in darkness in the wake of the storm. With its night view, VIIRS is able to detect a more complete view of storms and other weather conditions, such as fog, that are difficult to discern with infrared, or thermal, sensors. Night is also when many types of clouds begin to form.
"NOAA's National Weather Service is continuing to explore the use of the day-night band," said Mitch Goldberg, program scientist for NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System. "The very high resolution from VIIRS data will take forecasting weather events at night to a much higher level."
Unlike a camera that captures a picture in one exposure, the day-night band produces an image by repeatedly scanning a scene and resolving it as millions of individual pixels. Then, the day-night band reviews the amount of light in each pixel. If it is very bright, a low-gain mode prevents the pixel from oversaturating. If the pixel is very dark, the signal is amplified.
"It's like having three simultaneous low-light cameras operating at once and we pick the best of various cameras, depending on where we're looking in the scene," Miller said. The instrument can capture images on nights with or without moonlight, producing crisp views of Earth's atmosphere, land and ocean surfaces.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC (http://ow.ly/1Q0EEi)
on the path of wild poetry
Morpheus and Iris, 1811 by Pierre Narcisse Guerin (1774 - 1833)
in the dark
the scent of iris
coming home
In Greek mythology, Iris, messenger of the gods, descends from a rainbow and rouses Morpheus, the god of dreams.
Bio - http://tinyurl.com/cgaa7w6
July 29, 2012 ~ James Lick in The Bamboo Room
A Message From Melpomene / photo by peach
sing me back home...
these hands remember pickin'
this land is your land
A Guitar Is Like Midnight
No two guitars are alike.
In fact, no two guitarists are alike.
And, if you ever get a chance to listen,
listen to different people play
the same guitar,
one after another,
you'll find out…
a guitar is more like midnight
than a monkey wrench.
A wrench is a tool designed
to do one thing, well.
Don’t know if there’s a god or not,
or if a part of me will live on after I’m gone.
But,
I’ll tell you this,
the guitar has a soul.
Maybe it’s how they’re made,
wood and steel,
cut, bent and molded, inlaid
sanded and polished and rubbed and coated
with mysterious quicksilver vapors
and liquid silks, rubbed and polished.
Strung
and tuned and played and played
and tuned and restrung
and tuned
and tuned
and played.
Held close and caressed…
sometimes feather strummed.
Other times picked and beaten blue
with every color
of joy
hard luck
childhood laughs
and case after case
of one-true-love memories.
Or lonely like a guitar in a case
under the bed unopened,
unplayed and brittle.
One day you open that case and find
Autumn inside.
Pick it up and play.
Where is Spring?
I don’t remember
Summer leaving.
What kind of leaves are these?
Now every song you pick
is like a trail of frets on a rosewood neck
through an October forest
of spruce
of ovangkol koa
of hearts of maple.
now my heart remembers what my hands forget
music echoes where old songs collect
find this guitar another home
for me to leave this poem
- Peach
June 28, 2012 ~ On Top Of Old Smoky
cowboy cooking dinner
after dinner
on top of old smoky
with acoustic guitars
photo - public domain
| http://library.byways.org/assets/25406 |
