Textures of the earth

Here on earth, we see everything from a standing point perspective. This means that if we look straight in front, we are likely to see the horizon. While this perspective can often be astonishingly beautiful, we are missing out on what satellites see of our giant blue planet.

To satisfy your eyes, here are some beautiful looking textures of our home.

Band-e-Amir National Park, Afghanistan

Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse

Chaiten Volcano, Chile

Thunderstorms on the Brazilian Horizon

Biokovo Range, Croatia

Carajás Mine, Brazil

Glacial Dust off Alaska

Great Blue Hole, Belize

Some of the most interesting satellites are Earth observing satellites which provide us with incredible imagery for many purposes such as weather and environment. They are usually located at an altitude between 600km and 800km above our planet and travel at an approximate speed of 27 000km/hour. While satellite imagery has been around for decades, it was pretty much inaccessible before 2004. It really started to be accessible and popular when Google launched Google Earth in 2005. Everyone was impressed to see their home on the search engine giant. Today Google Maps/Earth is an essential tool whenever people go out to an unfamiliar place.

Curious minds will also enjoy the NASA Earth Observatory site which offers a daily article with a satellite image related to our planet Earth.

Speaking of satellites, there is also tons of space junk orbiting the earth. This so called debris could be very destructive to existing satellites as a centimeter cube particle hitting an object in space could pulverize that object into even more debris. Fortunately, there is so much cubic space up there that the chance of a debris hitting a functional satellite is quite small.

Halloween, Rockets and Typography

Not so long ago, the excellent designer Jason Santa Maria, and writer Rob Giampietro posted an article mentioning the rocket candies for this upcoming Halloween.

I thought the idea was fantastic and I though that I could use the little round candies for something creative! So I took my camera, stole a few rocket packs and started shooting alphabet shapes. Here is the result:

Mooooooose

I know that it has been a little while since I posted and I apologize for the delay. I have been extremely busy over the last few weeks which kept me from posting more often.

As you may remember, I posted an article a few weeks ago about the Parc National de la Jacques-Cartier. Well, I liked this park so much that I have returned at least four times since then! As a result, I have been quite lucky to see 3 moose and 3 beavers on October 12th 2009. I have to admit that I was impressed to see those mammals as I rarely see animals out in the wild.

Now the park is slowly starting to be covered in snow, but rest assured that I will prepare my snowshoes to snap some more picture this upcoming winter! Peace.

To tweet or not to tweet?

Twitter has been the hot buzz over the last few years as far as social networking goes. The free service allows users to post (really) short message of a maximum of 140 characters via it’s website http://twitter.com and via mobile phones.

I have known the service for a long time, but I never had an account until today. Maybe one of the reasons is that I have read studies that suggests that approxmatly 60% of Twitter users quit during the first month and I didn’t want to be part of the statistics. It’s all cool sending little messages, but social networking takes time and time is precious. I have decided to try it out and see if I can make a benefit from the service. Moreover, I want to explore the possibilities behind Twitter as it’s popularity keeps increasing as days goes by. Many companies and organizations have even started using it as a marketing tool.

You may have noticed that my site articles now show a retweet button located at the upper right of my articles. This button allows users to tweet and retweet my articles. The number of tweets are then compiled on the Tweetmeme site which is similar to Digg except it uses tweets. You are all invited to try it out!

All things considered, I believe that Twitter can be useful and fun to use. In the meantime, make sure to checkout my new Twitter account here!

Poll:  Do you have a personal or business Twitter account?

Acropole des Draveurs

October 3rd 2009 — With only three hours of sleep, I woke up at 2h00 in the morning to mix hiking and sunrise (thanks to Francis Gagnon for the idea of leaving earlier than early!). Quick breakfast and hop, I was comfortably driving my Corolla to Sépaq’s Haute-Gorges national park with my two passengers Maxim and Eric.

On our way to the park, it seemed like the 170 kilometers of road had been built for just a single car: My car! Only a a few trucks were still awake that morning. It was so quiet, that I had found a good cruising speed to reach our destination until this animal slowly crossed the white line of the winding road. It was a big porcupine who seemed to own the road. After pressing the horn, the beast released it’s spines, and slowly walked away, it was wonderful.

By 5AM we were at parked and grabbing our flashlights to climb the steep rocky walls of the Acropole des Draveur trail. During the first 45 minutes of hiking, there was no wind and no lights (except the tiny spots of our one dollar flashlights). The only thing we could hear is the elegant sound of cascades rushing down the rocks. It was only on the way back the we saw this treasure of water.

After the first hour of walking, I was exhausted, I badly wanted to sleep and throw up, obviously the fatigue had caught up with me. I guess my body isn’t used to do this sort of thing too often! So we took a little break, we had a little energy bar and a few sips of water, and we were back on track. When the natural light started to show up, I regained all my energy and climbed to the top with more power than ever before!

Once we made it to the top, we had two enemies, the wind, and the cold. I have to admit that my hat and mittens were my best friends. No wonder some signs were mentioning arctic vegetation! Despite the cold weather, the view was impressive. There was a huge white steamy turbulent cloud hovering the valley. I guess it was some kind of heaven with a touch of hell at the same time.

About an hour later, we eat our sandwiches and shortly after, the clouds started to disappear and the valley was slowly becoming visible to our eyes. WOW, what a view!

To finish off, on our way back down, we thought we would cross at most ten to fifteen people. Visibly we were wrong, we crossed a whooping 150 people! This sure is a popular destination!

Peace! MPC