Wow! The Most Amazing Image in Science

[skywizard]

I ran across this photo on source below with no explaination or discription except by laying your mouse on the photo it says "clouds near space". Is it the North or South Pole? If so what the hell is that HOLE in the center?

Anyone have any other ideas (other than hollow earth)?


Source: http://www.livescience.com/42221-wow...this-week.html


confused...
skywizard

[Eelco]

I think its the south pole..
The landmass on the left looks like the southeren tip of south america.
The hole is indeed strange..

With Love
Eelco

[john parslow]

I think it is the North Pole, famous for having a large hole at the centre - that is why no-one is 'allowed' to overfly it ... the black hole right at the centre may be obfuscation so we cannot view the actual hole, just a thought. JP

[Spiral]

The landmass outlined is definitely Antarctica. (The north pole is ice only, there is no landmass underneath)



The dark circle could be from the device used to capture the image, or it could be a composite from many devices ?

Night-shining clouds started glowing high above Antarctica earlier than usual this year, observations from a NASA satellite show.

These rare types of wispy blue-white clouds are called noctilucent clouds, or NLCs. They form when water molecules freeze around "meteor smoke" close to the edge of space, typically about 50 to 53 miles (80 and 85 kilometers) above Earth's surface — so high that they can reflect light after the sun sets.

The phenomenon looks spectacular from the ground, but scientists also have watched these night-shining clouds from above with NASA's AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) satellite since 2007. Data from AIM indicate that noctilucent clouds started forming around the South Pole on Nov. 20 this year as a tiny spot of electric blue that quickly expanded to cover the entire frozen continent,

According to Electric Universe theory this is water forming in our upper atmosphere from hydrogen that arrives in the solar wind & oxygen molecules that go up to meet the solar out bursts.

That is why sea levels are rising (very slowly)

[Eelco]

This is my living room wall.


And this is at the bottom of that map.
near the south pole ;-)

The landmasses resemble the masses on the left side of the foto above



With Love
Eelco

[Frances]

I never knew that there was no land under the ice at the North Pole.
Fancy that!
Frances.

[Calabash]

I never knew that there was no land under the ice at the North Pole.
Fancy that!
Frances.

Me neither Francis . . . . . but I do know that Lake Vostok is at the South Pole (Antarctica). But is it perfectly round? Probably not . . .

[Spiral]

I never knew that there was no land under the ice at the North Pole.
Fancy that!
Frances.

That is why they used to look for the "north west passage" over the top of Canada, it would have been a massive short cut.

Heres a map, you can see Greenland, Canada & a bunch of Islands between (on the left) them & Siberia (on the right) are the nearest

[The One]

Hollow Earth anyone

[Eelco]

Hollow Earth anyone

Hmmm if the earth is hollow an entrance would be there, I guess.
However the hole in this photo seems to neat to represent that entrance don't you think? either its blacked out by this black dot. Or its a bye product of the methods used to make this photo.

What do you think?

With Love
Eelco

[Seikou-Kishi]

I think the black circle is just a circular cut-out of the dark blue background like the triangles cut out of the edge of the circle. It probably indicates the pole. The curious thing for me is the shape of the pattern. The gap in the centre seems to align rather well with what I assume is the south pole, though it's by no means a perfect circle.

[BabaRa]

I think it is the North Pole, famous for having a large hole at the centre - that is why no-one is 'allowed' to overfly it ... the black hole right at the centre may be obfuscation so we cannot view the actual hole, just a thought. JP

Why is no one allowed to fly over it - and how do they enforce that?

I vote for Admiral Byrd and the holllow earth .

[Seikou-Kishi]

Why is no one allowed to fly over it - and how do they enforce that?

I vote for Admiral Byrd and the holllow earth .

Well the North Pole is quite far from populated areas. It's likely that the only crafts capable of flying far enough without refuelling are military or commercial crafts, which are heavily regulated. I can't imagine the the glider-hobbyist not only reaching tue North Pole, but also being able to return.

[Spiral]

Well the North Pole is quite far from populated areas. It's likely that the only crafts capable of flying far enough without refuelling are military or commercial crafts, which are heavily regulated. I can't imagine the the glider-hobbyist not only reaching tue North Pole, but also being able to return.

They'd have a hell of a time finding thermals up there

[Altaira]

http://www.livescience.com/42139-ele...ica-video.html

this is the scientific explanation of these clouds. The video above is from the link provided by Skwiz . I would imagine that the hole in the middle is from the device they used.






Here is anther picture from NASA's earth observatory

This is an image of the North Pole taken in 2007 and it resembles the first picture and I am thinking that it might be from the same gallery. The only difference is that the first one is from the South pole and the second is from the North pole. They both have holes in the middle so it is from their device and this cannot be related to the hollow earth entrance I think.

Here is some more info from NASA's website

At high latitudes in the summer months, iridescent clouds form some 80 kilometers (50 miles) above the surface of the Earth. Their high altitude allows them to reflect sunlight after the Sun has set. These night-shining, or noctilucent, clouds long puzzled the researchers who studied them, who wondered how they formed. The clouds’ behavior grew even more mysterious over the past two decades as the clouds began to shine more brightly and appear at lower latitudes than they did before.
The first satellite designed to study noctilucent clouds, NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission released the first view of these clouds over the entire Northern Hemisphere in 2007, at a resolution of approximately 5 kilometers (3 miles). This image, acquired on June 11, 2007, shows some of the first data AIM collected about these clouds. In this image, centered on the North Pole, white indicates clouds with the greatest density of ice particles, and dark blue indicates clouds with the lowest. Because ice particles reflect sunlight, a greater concentration of such particles creates a higher albedo—the ratio of reflected light to total incoming light. Areas of no data appear in black, and landmass outlines appear in blue-green.
Noctilucent clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds, form in a part of the atmosphere roughly 50 to 86 kilometers (30 to 54 miles) above the surface of our planet. In the months following AIM’s early observations, researchers working with the satellite shared some of their findings. They discovered that the clouds appear daily, are widespread, and vary on an hourly to daily basis. They also found that the clouds’ brightness varies over horizontal scales of about 3 kilometers (2 miles). To their surprise, the researchers also noticed that the ice in the mesosphere—the layer of the atmosphere where the clouds form—occurs in a single, continuous layer stretching from about 82 to 89 kilometers (51 to 55 miles) above the Earth’s surface.
By late 2007, AIM had documented the life cycle of noctilucent clouds in the Northern Hemisphere, noting that they first appeared around May 25 and lasted through late August. Although AIM had provided researchers with valuable information on noctilucent clouds by the end of the year, many other questions remained, and the researchers planned to keep watching AIM’s progress over the life of the mission.