The timelapse starts over the clouded North Pacific and moves toward the west coast of the United States, where one can see the yellow lights of civilization.  The space station continues over California and then Meixco.  Off the coast of Mexico, one can see thunderstorms with the flashes of lighting illuminating vast swaths of cloud and these thunderstorms continue off the coast of Central America until the space station reaches South America.  It traces along the Andes until it reaches Chile, at which point, the sun rises, flooding the camera and ending the movie.

I highly recommend watching it.

An important point of note in Canadian elections is that MPs are chosen in much the same way as their counterparts in the UK House of Commons and Representatives in the United States House of Representatives:  by single member district plurality.  What this means is that even with only about 40% of the vote, the Conservative Party was able to secure a majority of the seats because votes only count toward district results.

While this was a spectacular loss for the Liberals, including the loss of their leader Michael Ignatieff’s seat to Conservative opponent Bernard Trottier, the political realignment also resulted in the toppling of Bloc Québécquois, the French-speaking secessionist party whose significant presence in the Canadian Parliament has permitted the presence of minority governments as no other party was willing to form a coalition with the Bloc.  As of this posting, it appears that they will hold on to 3 of their current total of 49 seats.

In summary (for those of you without a spare hour on your hands), both men were opposed to the intervention in Libya from the start and if you look a few posts down, I had reservations about it myself, so I’m essentially sharing a discussion from two individuals reflecting my own views.  I think, as these two gentlemen do, that the intervention was imprudent and that the events that have transpired since them have largely borne out this judgment.

I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

While this may seem like a nonsensical vision, taken in the context of this political advertisement from last year’s congressional election:

It is clear that the future which Gingrich described is one where Americans worship Chinese Allah:

What a fearsome future that would be.

As the article describes, the shadow of the Earth does not form a clean, smooth arc across the image of the sun as does the Moon because the Earth has an atmosphere, which has variable thickness and does not block the extreme ultraviolet light that SDO detects as efficiently as lunar rock.

It’s worth noting that not all wavelengths are created equal.  This 1700 Å (170 nm; 10 Å = 1nm) image was taken a mere 12 seconds after the 193 Å image above and yet, as you can see there is only a slight dimming at the bottom of the Sun’s disk:

Lest you think that this is the result of the spacecraft moving out of the shadow of Earth’s atmosphere over the course of those 12 seconds, here is an image taken at the slightly shorter 1600 Å wavelength another 10 seconds later.

Clearly a greater portion of the Sun’s disk is blocked, even though the spacecraft was moving out of the Earth’s shadow when it was taken.  All this illustrates an extremely important aspect of our planet’s atmosphere: while it is nearly entirely transparent to light visible to humans (roughly 400-750 nm or 4000-7500 Å), it is opaque to many wavelengths in the infrared and ultraviolet, especially in the far ultraviolet.  This is incredibly important because without this opacity, it would be much more difficult to maintain life on the surface of the Earth.

At this point, an astute reader may have noticed that none of the photographs of the sun displayed in this blog post (four including the header) are the same as the photo used in the Wired Science article.  The SDO website allows a remarkable amount of public access to its data.  To retrieve all these images, I went to the SDO data browser and searched for images starting from 2011-03-29 6:00:00.

This search query wasn’t random.  The Wired Science article mentioned that the picture it featured was taken on March 29, giving me the day.  However, to know what time frame the right image would appear in, I had to know a bit about the orbit of the spacecraft.

SDO is in a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, an orbital trajectory over 42,000 km above the Earth’s equator that allows the satellite to complete exactly one orbit per day, which means that the satellite will remain over a fixed point on the equator.  This property makes GEO an attractive piece of orbital real estate as is vividly shown in this illustration of satellite locations, courtesy of ESA.

The geosynchronous satellites make up the ring that spans most of the diagram.  As the diagram makes clear, the ring is a fair ways away from the Earth and because the Earth is tilted on its axis, so too is this ring of satellites.  This means that for most of the year, the Earth does not come between the Sun and the geosynchronous satellites.  The exception to this rule comes around the vernal and autumnal equinoxes in March and September, when the orbital nodes of this ring align with the Earth and the Sun, allowing for the Earth to cast a shadow on the satellites while it is midnight on the ground beneath them.

Since the Solar Dynamics Observatory is positioned at 102° W longitude, a station that allows it to transmit data at a high bandwidth via microwave transmission to antennas at White Sands Missle Range, it falls behind the Earth between 6:00 and 7:00 Universal Time.  In the case of the photographs shown here, they were captured between 7:14:37 and 7:15:06 UT.

I’d invite readers that are interested in seeing more to check out the data browser and searching for the photos themselves.  The AIA instrument that captured each of the above photos takes pictures in 10 different wavelengths and though not all of them caught the partial eclipsing of the Sun by the Earth, a good number did, and the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere is different for each wavelength.

There are a set of choropleth maps showing racial pluralities as above as well is distributions for specific groups, more general population maps, and vacant housing maps.  If you enjoy digging through such maps, I highly recommend that you check it out.