NASA Didn't Even Know!!

0:00 So NASA, via the gateway to astronaut photography of Earth project,

0:04 well I didn't know about this.

0:05 I'll be honest with you.

0:06 I did I also didn't know about this map that is now loading.

0:09 What is happening?

0:10 Oh my god.

0:11 My computer is uh my uh video capture software is slowing down.

0:17 I need to close this.

0:18 I need to leave.

0:18 You can figure out what that is on your own.

0:20 You're going to enjoy it.

0:21 But this is one of several tools through which NASA

0:23 releases image and about 12,000 Artemis photos just dropped through this.

0:27 Around 12,000 photos dropped and they're inside

0:29 of this tool which is extremely bad.

0:31 It is slow.

0:31 Just don't think that it's used to seeing much

0:34 traffic and it's seeing a lot of traffic right now.

0:35 Like I just clicked on this and you know, it'll get there.

0:38 That's actually way faster than it was when I was first doing this.

0:41 But like there's a general problem here which is

0:43 that a lot of these photos are pretty bad.

0:45 Like they're going to be pretty bad.

0:46 A lot of them are of nothing.

0:48 Uh this is just a black screen.

0:49 These are just all the photos they took and sometimes

0:51 they had the settings wrong or they were figuring stuff out.

0:54 So one, a lot of these photos are like not particularly interesting.

0:57 Like this is a photo of the full moon.

0:59 It looks a lot like the photos of the full moon that you've seen before.

1:01 And then it also in addition to that, if

1:02 I'm going to add them to the artemistimeline.com tool,

1:06 I'm not going to add 12,000 photos to the tool because

1:08 it's just going to make it impossible to use the tool.

1:10 So quick and dirty, the main tool,

1:12 you can go through 50 images and pick the five you like best.

1:15 So maybe you're going to be frustrated that you

1:16 like can't get like all of the coolest ones.

1:18 That one's pretty cool.

1:20 This one's cool.

1:21 This This is quite cool.

1:23 That's good.

1:24 This is good.

1:25 And then you got five and you can't pick more than five.

1:27 And that's annoying, right?

1:28 Because maybe I want this one of the Earth

1:29 or maybe I want this really dark one of the eclipse.

1:31 But if everybody does this, it all adds up and we bring

1:34 the ones to the top that people find the most interesting and attractive.

1:37 And you submit your pics and people have done this.

1:40 I just posted this on the community tab and if you if you do enough of them,

1:42 you get access to the final list that this creates which

1:45 I'm about to show you because now we have enough votes.

1:48 So I'll load up for you the leaderboard

1:50 right now and you will see an interesting effect.

1:53 It's coming any moment now.

1:55 People like the eclipse.

1:56 People liked the eclipse.

1:58 Now one thing is that there were a lot of these.

2:00 So that the whoever was taking these eclipse pictures took a bunch of them.

2:04 Make sense.

2:05 They were doing this and then they were

2:06 changing the settings and going That's what you do,

2:08 especially if you are doing a long exposure.

2:11 You're going to have a bunch that have non-ideal settings.

2:14 You're going to have a bunch where there's a little jiggle.

2:16 Uh and like but you do get these ones like this which is like way more exposed

2:20 than any of the other ones that we've seen

2:21 which is quite pretty because you see so much.

2:24 Like all of this uh is lit up dust of the solar system.

2:26 So just the sun hitting particles of dust in the solar system.

2:30 That's the the zodiacal light and you just get to see so much of it.

2:34 And then also you sometimes get to see like little effects.

2:36 Like this is the number one most picked one.

2:39 And like it's kind of nice that there are

2:42 these and I think that these are just like window glare.

2:45 There's also this these streaks here which is the Earth,

2:48 the brightness of the Earth.

2:50 I don't know if they're interacting

2:50 with the lens or with the window or something.

2:52 This is crazy.

2:53 But the top voted picture in this tool is not one

2:57 of the ones NASA initially released which I think is awesome.

3:00 But is it the best one I'm going to show you?

3:01 Is it the coolest thing I'm going to show you in this video?

3:04 No, it is not.

3:04 And in fact, that is not something that NASA released.

3:07 It's something that somebody made and then I asked if

3:09 I could show it in this video and they said yes.

3:11 Doing a final cut on this video right now and I realized what

3:12 a stupid thing I did which is that I did a whole thing where I

3:15 figured out everybody's favorite image from Artemis

3:18 and there's eight days left in the calendar

3:19 pre-order which means that there is still time to make changes to the calendar.

3:23 And so I did that.

3:24 I swapped out September for the image that everybody liked the most.

3:27 It's this one here.

3:28 That is now September because it was

3:31 the It was number one and that was obviously

3:33 something I should do and I'm very glad that there was still time to do it.

3:36 And if you want a 2027 calendar with photos

3:38 from Artemis and we're also doing like anniversaries of Artemis dates

3:42 in the calendar so you can like relive the experience

3:45 a little bit and remember that humans can do great things.

3:47 There's a link to it in the description.

3:48 Now back to the video.

3:49 So what you see now is that like this isn't actually

3:51 that useful because if I just pick the top like pictures to include,

3:56 I'm just going to get a bunch of the same photos cuz everybody liked this.

3:59 There's actually only four of these.

4:00 So but everybody liked these types, you know?

4:03 And then everybody liked this.

4:05 And then, you know, you've got more and and like

4:06 all of these ones also made it in.

4:08 There There is like a top voted one which is nice.

4:10 I love that you can see the outline of the window pane here.

4:13 And so like that's not going to be ideal.

4:16 So what I've decided to do is I created

4:18 a little version of this that lets me curate

4:21 it and I'm going to take that down after

4:23 this because if a bunch of people go to it,

4:25 it will be a problem for NASA's website because it preloads the images

4:27 in the background so I don't have to wait for them to load.

4:29 That's just for me.

4:30 Nobody else can use it.

4:31 But if I go to vote /curate,

4:34 and then I can download just the like a spreadsheet of the names

4:38 of these pictures and then I can use that to do two things with.

4:42 Number one, to populate the Artemis timeline with them.

4:45 And number two, I'm going to do

4:46 a head-to-head face-off tool where it's like this versus

4:48 this and then we're going to see if it changes what the top photo is.

4:52 If we can see a like easy more easily see a high-res version of these.

4:56 And then it'll be like a much smaller number.

4:57 It won't be 12,000.

4:58 It might be 200.

4:59 I don't know.

5:00 I don't know how many I'm going to end up take like picking after this.

5:03 But for example, we are going to pick this one.

5:05 And it will also be a pain in the ass to figure out

5:07 which of these I don't actually know I'm going to do this but I

5:09 think that there are ways to make sure I don't duplicate because

5:11 these have different file names than the ones I pulled from Flickr, of course.

5:14 So what I've decided to do here is to not take any

5:16 account of whether or not these pictures are already in the timeline.

5:19 I do not know and I will not know.

5:21 I'm just going to pick them all and then I'm going to fix that in the merge.

5:25 So I think that the right thing to do

5:26 at this stage is to just do like a manual pick.

5:30 Images like this one here, there's a bunch of them and they all

5:33 are oriented roughly the same way and it would

5:35 be very easy to line all of these up and then make an animation out of them.

5:38 But what I wouldn't have thought to do and what I really is the reason that I

5:43 like you should be watching this video right now

5:45 is you can also do that with these pictures.

5:47 So there's a ton of these Earth from the dark side pictures

5:51 and they all like kind of surfaced roughly together inside of the tool.

5:55 People ranked them similarly and it occurred to me

5:57 that it would be super amazing if you like created a time lapse with all

6:00 of these images as Artemis was moving around the moon.

6:03 It would make it look like you were like watching the Earth set

6:06 as the astronauts did and you could kind of see it as a video.

6:09 But I'm certainly not going to do that.

6:10 But I hope somebody does.

6:11 But it would not have occurred to me to do this with the pictures of the Earth.

6:15 And I looked at these and I thought

6:16 like I've learned everything I can from them.

6:18 The only thing that's lighting the Earth right now is the moon.

6:21 There's a little bit of zodiacal light down here.

6:24 And but like that's I figured that's

6:25 all you could really tell from these, right?

6:27 And you know, you'd think two of them would

6:29 give you the same data as one of them.

6:30 So I wouldn't even think to do a time lapse with those.

6:33 So like take all the pictures and then lay

6:35 them on top of each other and see what happened.

6:37 But somebody did think to do that.

6:39 Responsibility number 2097 did and I asked them if I

6:43 could include it in the timeline and in a video.

6:46 So this is the most sci-fi picture of the Earth I have ever seen.

6:49 And they would not have been able to see what we are

6:51 able to see here because this is such a high ISO camera.

6:55 So this is going to be much brighter than what the human eye would detect.

6:57 He did not know what was going to pop

7:00 up when you lay these things one after another.

7:03 I don't know if anybody's seen it yet as you're,

7:06 you know, this is playing on the screen.

7:07 So first of all, you could see up at the top and at the bottom

7:09 that like you could see the movement of the northern lights which is very cool.

7:13 But you know, we've seen that in time lapses from the International

7:16 Space Station but never at the scale of the whole Earth.

7:19 But also, we've also seen time lapses

7:21 of this from the International Space Station.

7:23 Over on the right, you could see a thunderstorm

7:26 with like flashes of lightning which is amazing.

7:29 So that's the the the long exposures

7:30 and the high ISO is catching these flashes of lightning.

7:33 But by far the craziest, most intense,

7:37 like oh my god, we are a technological species.

7:41 Like you can see not just the lights

7:44 of the cities of the Earth lighting up here.

7:46 Which is like that's like a civilizational planet.

7:48 That is like a planet of advanced life.

7:50 Oh, I want to I'm before I tell you the thing,

7:52 I'm going to mention one more thing which is that I

7:55 I want to know is this right in the middle here?

7:59 This like so there's clouds and maybe

8:01 this is just clouds but it looks like there's

8:02 a glow here in the middle and there's like

8:06 a thing that does it may not be clouds.

8:09 I feel like that might be the moon reflecting in the Earth which

8:12 I would not have thought about if I was just looking at this image.

8:16 Oh god, this is so cool.

8:18 Now the other thing is that you

8:19 can actually see the Earth very slightly twisting

8:22 and you could also see it getting smaller

8:24 because they're moving away from the Earth very quickly.

8:25 But the thing that absolutely blew my mind and I was like,

8:28 is that what I'm actually seeing?

8:30 Is the satellites.

8:32 These little this swarm of satellites to the left

8:35 and to the right and that's I think that they

8:37 are you can see them there because that's where they're

8:39 catching the glint of the sun or of the moon.

8:43 I don't know where the light is coming from.

8:44 But I know that these are satellites.

8:45 I know that they could be nothing besides satellites.

8:47 And there's actually at the top, you could see I think, I'm pretty sure,

8:51 you could see an orbit of a chain

8:53 of Starlink satellites that's coming up over and they are

8:55 catching and then they're they're disappearing as they're they're

8:58 no longer like bouncing the light of probably the sun.

9:02 I don't know how else they could possibly be bright enough to glow without

9:07 it being that they are actually catching the sunlight right on the edge there.

9:11 Think that they would catch the sunlight

9:13 that from the perspective of those satellites, they could see the sun.

9:16 But like Artemis obviously can't because the Earth is in the way.

9:18 But from up where they are, I think that they could see the sun

9:20 and then they're bouncing the light of the sun

9:23 to Artemis and that is making them visible even

9:25 though they are all of course tiny tiny tiny things.

9:29 There's like it's crazy that you can see them in this animation.

9:34 I mean oh my god.

9:36 Uh but you can because it's about light.

9:39 It's not about size.

9:40 It's about photons.

9:41 And this is detecting so many photons.

9:43 Like there This is a very dark Earth with a very high ISO, very long exposure.

9:47 And I do feel like this is the reflection of the moon

9:49 in the in the I feel like that's the reflection of the moon in the ocean.

9:53 I really want to know if that's the case.

9:55 But the fact that you could see this these like this swarming satellites,

9:59 which looks absolutely crazy.

10:01 You know, like there's like the blue marble is one thing,

10:03 but to see it animated like this, to see it slowly spin,

10:07 to see it like retracting into the distance as they move away from it,

10:09 and to see the aurora moving in the thunderstorm with its lightning flashes,

10:13 and the swarm of little guys all across

10:16 the outside providing services for the people on the surface.

10:19 I mean, that's a good planet.

10:21 And it's not quite like that blue marble sensibility that maybe

10:24 you get when you're up there on space when you're like,

10:25 "Oh my gosh, look, there are no borders.

10:28 It's just one Earth." The addition of the satellites,

10:30 and they're all going such different speeds and, you know,

10:33 in different orbits and stuff.

10:34 But like that addition, it just makes me feel like this place is so alive.

10:41 And not just alive with life, but alive with intelligence.

10:45 And that's like a different kind of of life.

10:47 I think about this all the time, and I I've never like articulated it publicly.

10:50 How like, you know, technology and culture is in so

10:54 many ways identical to the processes of natural selection,

10:57 but through different mechanisms.

10:59 And so it is like a There's so much that is analogous.

11:02 There's so much that tie those things together.

11:04 And that just like I feel it.

11:05 I feel it really strongly looking at this.

11:07 And I don't think that anyone knew that when you stitch these pictures together,

11:10 you would get this effect of the satellites swarming around the outside there.

11:14 Like I saw this on Reddit this morning, and I was like,

11:16 I am the like among the first thousand people who have ever had

11:19 this experience of seeing the Earth alive in all of these ways simultaneously.

11:25 Like alive with the the geology of the aurora,

11:28 cuz the aurora is like more or less a geological phenomenon.

11:31 And then alive with like the water cycle of thunderstorms.

11:34 And then alive with the green on the continents.

11:37 And then alive with the the city lights on the coasts of these continents.

11:41 And then alive with the satellites twinkling

11:44 and threading through space on the outside.

11:47 It's going to make you feel like there's way more of them than there are.

11:50 There's a lot of them, but the Earth is very big.

11:52 Like it but we can only see these because like this is

11:54 such a sensitive photograph or such a a sensitive series of photographs.

11:58 But like I mean, I really am like truly 10

12:01 minutes late for this meeting, and I have to go.

12:03 But I just couldn't stop myself.

12:05 I had to record this.

12:06 Earth is so good.

12:07 It is It is such a good planet.

12:09 I feel so good about it.

12:11 I am so I am such a fan.

12:14 I will put a link to this in the description.

12:15 I'm also going to put up, once I download all of these photos,

12:19 the pictures I've picked as the top of the top thousand.

12:24 And you'll you'll be able to like do with this or that, and we'll

12:26 see which surfaces as the best picture from Artemis.

12:30 What I will say is there is now no doubt

12:33 in my mind that this is the best image from Artemis.

12:38 This moving image.

12:39 I don't think it's something that they intended to capture at all.

12:43 Like I remember it like Victor Glover said

12:45 in a press conference that Reid Wiseman tried

12:46 this, and they didn't know if they were going to be able to get this shot well.

12:49 I don't think that they planned to be like in a perfectly eclipsed Earth,

12:52 but I guess that was what happened no matter what.

12:54 They definitely did not know that they were going

12:56 to be able to capture the glints of satellites.

12:58 That is a thing that we found out because

13:00 somebody did this and then posted it on Reddit.

13:03 Can you see the reflection of the moon in the Earth?

13:05 I don't see why you couldn't.

13:06 It's pretty big.

13:07 It's bright.

13:07 It's definitely right behind them because it's lighting up the whole planet.

13:10 It's in full moon configuration, which is again just luck.

13:14 Like so much happened like had to go right

13:17 for this image to happen, and it is amazing.

13:19 Good god.

13:20 So, if if I have the versus this or that up,

13:25 um it'll be a link in the description.

13:26 And if you want to see the leaderboard, you can do that.

13:28 And uh and I probably won't have the timeline

13:30 updated by the time this video is live,

13:31 but I will have it updated soon after that.

13:35 Thanks for watching you want to play connections.

13:36 Oh, I already played it.

13:38 Yeah, you can't watch.

13:40 I already did it.