There’s something incredibly awe-inspiring about the footage embedded at the bottom of this piece. It’s a montage compiled by Knate Meyers from a huge store of images captured by the International Space Station of our planet Earth as it goes about its daily business of spinning serenely through the endless inky void of space. It’s the kind of thing that makes you realize how utterly insignificant we are, despite endless reassurance that mankind is the pinnacle of biological evolution. No matter how smart or rich you are, in comparison to space itself your existence is less than meaningless, and when we’re dead and gone our giant blue marble will continue hurtling through the darkness.
While we appreciate the music Meyers attached to the video, and will readily admit that it’s certainly stirring and triumphant in just the right ways, we would also like to recommend that before firing this video up for a second time that you mute the clip and start David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” about 30 seconds prior to hitting “play.” Granted, the song selection is a bit on the nose, but there’s never a bad time for Bowie and his tune really lends a maudlin, wistful air to the proceedings. Likewise, short of including footage of a doomed astronaut, the vignette complements the music nicely, giving viewers a solid point of reference for the lonesome wonder of seeing one’s home planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
As for how Meyers managed to create such spectacular visuals, that part is pretty simple. The International Space Station is equipped with high-definition cameras that capture images every few moments. Meyers merely removed noise and visual artifacts, touched up a few of the pictures in Photoshop and jammed them all together in sequence to create a time-lapse animation reel. The process certainly involves some impressive technology, but in the end it’s rather simple and only serves to amplify the inherent awe humans feel on viewing their world from space.
Gizmodo offers up a solid selection of similar videos created from space imagery in the past, but we’re inclined to agree with the site’s claim that this is “The Most Spectacular Night View of Earth Ever Captured by NASA.” Propers to Knate Meyers for his work here.
