Serendipity
So there you are, an astronaut on the International Space Station, just motoring along, doing your job, and you get a call from Ground Control.
“Say, dudes! Lissen up! There’s this Russian volcano blowing its top, and you dudes are scheduled to be somewhere nearby overhead today…can y’all take a picture for us? Dude, that would be sweet.”
So as time approaches the rendezvous with this volcano, from a few miles overhead, you fish out your handy-dandy HD camera and point it out the porthole (or whatever astronauts really do when they’re taking photographs manually, which I know they can do)…and you grab this photo, very early on in a big eruption:
Which then proceeds to absolutely wow various folk around the world, including volcanologists.
And including me. I immediately tweeted it, but just in case my faithful blog subscribers aren’t also Twitter followers, I thought I’d better mention it here. It’s just too, too cool for words. (For those who are interested, a bigger version of this picture is available at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.)
posted in Photography, Science, Volcano | 2 Comments
