Forget Selfies. 2014 Was the Year of the Earthie.
Just when you’re sure there’s nothing left to say about selfies, somebody comes along with an extending pole that attaches to a camera … and suddenly “selfie sticks” are everywhere.
That’s too bad, because this lingering focus on one specific kind of image has distracted us from a much more interesting development in contemporary visual creativity. Particularly in the past few months, there’s been an outpouring of jaw-dropping imagery (some new, some newly repackaged for online consumption) taken from space.
So you’d have to have a pretty long selfie stick to compete with these image-makers. Indeed, some of their coolest captures could be thought of as the opposite of selfies: Earthies.
The first photo of the entire Earth taken from space — often called “the Blue Marble Shot” — dates back to the last Apollo mission, in 1972. (More about that here.)
But the more recent giant leaps for such imagery include the release this past October of retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s popular book You Are Here, featuring some of the thousands of pictures he took during a six-month stint on the International Space Station — “195 stunning glimpses of the planet below,” as FastCo.Create put it.
Northern lights over Ireland and the United Kingdom. (Chris Hadfield via FastCo.Create)
Aside from his Earthie-taking prowess, Hadfield has emerged as a sort of poster boy for out-of-this world approaches to linking science and the arts: He recorded a version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with a video made on the ISS and once posted (sigh) a widely circulated space selfie on Twitter. (For the record, Buzz Aldrin has previously declared himself the taker of “the first space selfie,” made during the Gemini 12 mission in 1966.)
(Via @cmdr_hadfield)
Still, before you conclude that Hadfield is light-years ahead of the competition, you need to explore some other recent space shots.
A good place to start is this recent mini-documentary (just a few minutes long), released late last year, “From Above: Astronaut Photography,” in which NASA astronaut Don Pettit talks about the unique challenges and opportunities of shooting from space: You’re moving at 8 kilometers a second, but your view might extend over half a continent.
Not surprisingly, the accompanying imagery is stunning.
Last year, the European Space Agency launched a six-month mission called Blue Dot, named after Carl Sagan’s famous characterization of the way the Earth looked in a picture taken by the Voyager craft, so distant and diminutive it was just “a pale blue dot.”
The Blue Dot mission involved a variety of experiments but also produced some incredible imagery by astronaut Alexander Gerst. This clip of his time-lapses (via Metafilter) revels in the auroras, cloud movements, and shimmering lights that only a truly soaring, Earthie-level perspective can provide.
Similarly, here is a completely dazzling video, which went online in November, composed by Guillaume Juin from “over 80 GB” of previously unused imagery from the International Space Station taken in the past three years, according to Huh Magazine.
Astronaut - A journey to space from Guillaume JUIN on Vimeo.
Not to knock the power of the human eye in the Earthie-taking process, but this recently released time-lapse of pictures from a weather satellite offers an eerily gorgeous document of our big blue marble, passing from light to dark, day to day, its clouds silently swirling and creeping:
(Via Peta Pixel)
Just last month, NASA marked the 15-year anniversary of the launch of the first satellite in its Earth Observing System (now a network of 19 satellites in all). To celebrate the occasion, the agency released “15 impressive, awe-inducing or just plain interesting images” gathered by the orbiters since 1999.
Here’s one I found impressive (if not exactly uplifting): The collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf.
(Via NASA’s Earth Observatory)
One more Earthie to cheer us up: Here’s a surreally color-drenched clip of time-lapsed images of the northern lights (or aurora borealis) captured from space.
Getting tired of our planet? OK, let’s go beyond the Earthie. Here’s a beautiful picture of the moon (the side we can’t see) with that familiar blue marble trying to photobomb the scene, captured during a Chinese spacecraft’s lunar flyby last year:
(Via Peta Pixel)
And farther out in our solar system, here’s Tethys, a moon of Saturn, looking particularly photogenic in a shot documenting a gap between that planet’s famous rings. This was one of National Geographic’s picks for the best space pictures of 2014.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. (Via National Geographic)
Still not enough for you, space case? Go to the original sources: There’s a ton of interesting Earthie imagery at the site for NASA’s Earth Observing System, and more at this “Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth,” from NASA and the International Space Station program. Or check out this developer’s recently created ISS Photo Viewer, which offers more than a million images taken from the ISS, from 2000 to today, browsable via a “virtual globe.”
And, when you’re finally ready to return to your earthbound concerns, here’s one last clip from NASA, published on its YouTube channel just a few weeks ago: an “astronaut’s-eye view” of the Orion spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere of our pale blue dot and finally splashing down in the Pacific.
It’s not exactly action-packed — colors shift a bit as a result of temperature changes, clouds flit by, parachute mechanisms deploy — but some combination of the almost-abstract imagery and the patient pacing is quietly moving.
Who knows, you might just return from this little voyage with a bit of fresh distance on terrestrial image culture in the smartphone era. There’s nothing wrong with a selfie, of course. But sometimes it’s nice to marvel at things beyond the reach of any selfie stick.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
