Age of Flatism

My learning point (VS. some Serbian girls never grow up :-)

„The way to avoid being caught in the storm is to identify the confluence of factors and to change course – even though right now the sky is blue, the winds are gentle, and the water seems calm.
Don’t be fooled by the calm.
That’s always the time to change course – not when you are just about to get hit by typhoon.”

(Thomas L. Friedmann)

SPOTLIGHT
NASA Earth Observatory : SUNSET on FLAT world

Some of the most breathtaking views of Earth taken from space are those that capture our planet’s limb.
hen viewed from the side, the Earth looks like a flat circle, and the atmosphere appears like a halo around it. This glowing halo is known as the limb. Viewed from satellites, space shuttles, and even the moon, the image of this luminous envelope of gases shielding the life on our planet from the dark, cold space beyond rarely fails to fascinate us.

The two images above show the Earth’s limb captured by astronauts on the International Space Station.
The first is a view of the limb at sunset. The surface of the Earth appears as a dark disk at the bottom with the blackness of outer space draped over the top.
Below that image is a glimpse of the barren moon through the Earth’s limb. With no atmosphere, and therefore no limb of its own, the edge of the moon arcs crisply against the backdrop of space.

Views of the Earth’s limb are as functional as they are beautiful. The Shuttle Columbia (STS 107) carried the Shuttle Ozone Limb Sounding Experiment-2 (SOLSE-2) as a demonstration of new limb-viewing technology that will be used on the next generation of meteorological satellites to monitor ozone change. )