OK, here we are six days on and two weeks past the Equinox:
vis-l.jpg
This shows the other end of the day, to be specific, just a little bit past sunset where I live. Due to the inclination of the Earth's axis to the ecliptic, the sun has moved "south" a bit more, and so the terminator is tilted away from the meridians a bit more proving that the days are getting shorter here in New England (not that we needed any more proof than our eyeballs, mind).
It's amazing what we see when we look down from above.
The USA no longer has the ability to fly humans into space, which greatly saddens me because the entire run-up to the Apollo missions is what got me interested in engineering and computing. That driver is now long extinguished, not just because we as a society threw the technology and learned lessons away, but because robots perform the task so much better now than fragile carbon-based bits. However, and we're right on the cusp of it as I write this, at some point we're going to produce sentience in silicon -- and can we ethically send that somewhere that we would not go ourselves?
If you're wondering about what's next in Earth-observing satellites that are used for peaceful purposes (we leave the NRO and the NSA out of this), have a look at what the
next-generation of weather satellites are capable of, and if you really want to get your socks blown off have a look at
this high-resolution look at the eye of a hurricane.
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