Space Alphabet Captured By Satellite Images Is A Testament To Nature’s Beauty
A couple years ago, NASA science writer Adam Voiland embarked on a unique project: with the help of the Internet, he wanted to find every letter of the alphabet in satellite images taken from space.
Three years later, Voiland has revealed his space alphabet to the world. All 26 letters are represented, created from mountain ranges, islands, phytoplankton blooms, and wispy clouds, LiveScience reported.
But the space alphabet isn’t yet complete. Voiland has encouraged people to keep looking for letters in satellite images, and anyone who can find a better letter than the ones already found should contact NASA with the images’ date, latitude, and longitude.
It all began a few years ago, when Voiland was working on a story about wildfires and came across a satellite image of a smoke plume stretching over Canada, he wrote in a post about the project on the agency’s Earth Observatory site. To his eyes, the plume resembled the letter “V.”
And that made him wonder: what if there were more satellite images that together, captured the entire alphabet? And what if he could collect those images into a unique compilation using only NASA satellite imagery and astronaut photography?
Check out the natural alphabet @NASA has captured from @Space_Station :https://t.co/Q9Tsce47R8 #space #photos pic.twitter.com/P6C1aev9Qp
— Express Pictures (@Express_Pics) January 4, 2016
“This is the first that I’ve noticed, but I have no doubt there are many more to find given the ceaseless mixing and swirling of clouds, smoke, dust, ice, and even phytoplankton that constantly occurs on our planet,” Voiland wrote in a 2012 blog post.
In that same post, he reached out to the Internet community, readers, and colleagues with help in compiling what eventually became “Reading the ABCs from Space,” the Daily Mail added. People were asked to look for “anything that looks similar to a letter in the alphabet,” and then send the info on to him.
He provided six sites for his partners in the project to search: NASA Visible Earth, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Photojournal, Scientific Visualization Studio Archives, MODIS Image Gallery, and Landsat Imagery Gallery.
And the satellite images soon came pouring in, of mountain ranges and islands and reefs that resembled letters, and primarily taken by NASA satellites and images. Some were easy to find — O and C, for example, were a cinch. A, B, and R were the most difficult to pin down.
Once every letter had been found, Adam wrote a cute rhyming caption, inspired by his new son and their love for Dr Seuss; in his post on the project, he also included hyperlinks in each caption to turn the project into something as educational as it was beautiful.
The resulting image gallery is indeed astonishing, a testament to the beauty of planet Earth and the ability of humankind to find patterns in anything. Among the most stunning images are the letters A, E, H, J, K, P, S, and Y.
The letter A was captured by an astronaut on the International Space Station in June last year, and is formed by Bowknot Bend, a part of Utah’s Green River that doubles back on itself.
E was snapped by NASA’s Aqua satellite; the lowercase letter is made of a fleeting phytoplankton bloom that formed off the east coast of New Zealand. It was captured back in 2009.
All letters of the alphabet, as seen on Earth from space https://t.co/jSy1MvmdWu pic.twitter.com/4vbSh2MDXB
— BBC Science Focus Magazine (@sciencefocus) January 4, 2016
H is made of rivers that run through hills and ridges in southwestern Kyrgyzstan, and was taken by the OLI on Landsat 8 in August last year. A reef near Townsville, Australia, looks a lot like an aquamarine J, and was also taken by the OLI just this summer.
Glaciers in Mittimatalik, or Pond Inlet, Canada, drew a remarkable K in the Sirmilik National Park and was captured by the OLI this summer, as well. P was made by the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada; the Mackenzie River is the country’s longest, at 1,080 miles. The Terra satellite snapped this picture back in 2005.
For a brief and opportune moment, stratocumulus clouds over the Atlantic Ocean formed the letter S and were photographed by the Terra satellite in 2009. And Y is built from the Ugab River in Namibia, taken all the way back in 2000.
[Photo By NASA Earth Observatory]
