I must be honest here — the above is poor man’s HDR (aka I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing when I’m taking photos at night as proven by about twenty shots with increasingly desperate exposure settings). I basically cut the corner of the picture of the short exposure on the left, and pasted it into the corner of the picture of the longer exposure on the right. Such is the short-lived reign of photorealism here at Burrito Justice. But it’s pretty much what my eyes saw.
This one was a 15 second exposure:
Sadly, I missed the opportunity for a dramatic moon-behind-tree shot by about 5 minutes.
Since the Mission is not actually visible in the above video, I will reuse this awesome shot of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon from Japan’s late Kaguya orbiter.
Hopefully this puts some things in perspective. That earth is beautiful, no?
Next to the space program, infrastructure (specifically water and sewer systems) is likely our civilization’s crowning achievement. (Think about it — if you only could have one, would you choose running water/sewers, or electricity?)
All of this is an excuse for me to publish this absolutely disgusting picture of what happens when you dump unnecessary crap down your drain, from our friends at the SF Sewers blog:
So don’t bitch when you can’t make your usual left turn on your commute home for a couple of weeks in order for the hundred-plus year old infrastructure that your great-great-grandfather installed to be replaced so you can continue to dump old bacon grease down the garberator. And don’t bitch if taxes go up a little — as you may have noticed all sorts of infrastructure around here is COLLAPSING IN ON ITSELF.
You only appreciate this shit when it’s gone. And I don’t want that to happen on my watch. Time to get proactive, people. (Analogies may also be made for the global environment.)
(Um, so why don’t we have a bunch of low earth orbit satellites beaming down shots like this of our lovely planet? I’d pay for a dedicated cable channel with an HD feed of that.)
And then we have the Earth and our Moon. And Jupiter and its moons. As seen from Mars.