25 August 2025

Slow Derek


After watching this animation by Dan Ojari I am not sure I will ever read one of those little information cards that you get in cereal packets again. Ever.  This animation tells the story of Slow Derek who, as the name suggest, like to take things at an easy pace.  However, one morning he reads an interesting planetary fact – on one of those infocards – and Derek learns how quickly the earth rotates.  Things are never the same again for Derek, poor soul, who can’t quite compute his new knowledge.

Who can blame him for getting in to something of a tizzy?  After all, at the equator, the circumference of the Earth is 40,070 kilometers, and the day is 24 hours long so the speed is 1670 kilometers/hour ( 1070 miles/hr). This decreases by the cosine of your latitude so that at a latitude of 45 degrees, cos(45) = .707 and the speed is .707 x 1670 = 1180 kilometers/hr.  This formula can be used to find the speed of rotation at any latitude.  I think I will go and sit down for a while.

5 June 2012

Timelapse: Earthereal


We see many images of the International Space Station but it isn’t often that we get an impression of how it moves.  This remarkable film by Adonis Pulatus takes the film shot by the International Space Station Expedition 30 crew flying over practically every square mile of the globe.

Pulatus downloaded the high-resolution image sets that have been made available by the NASA Johnson Space Center and constructed this short time-lapse film in hi-res 2K project format. The result is something else. Forget CGI – this is the real thing!

23 February 2011

20 Amazing Examples of High Speed Photography

High speed photography is almost one hundred years old – the first recorded attempts were made in Germany in 1916. Almost a century later the technology available to us has changed dramatically, allowing us to see moments in time captured in a way that we could never have experienced before. Here are twenty amazing example of high speed photography. You will guess what some are in an instant – others may leave you rubbing your chin a little!