The Himalayas & Mount Everest from Space -A Galaxy Classic

Comments

[Colin]

Very cool photograph!

[dave]

If you look really close you can see a sherpa taking a onesie on top of K2.

[notachance]

Not a chance this is from space!! From 62 miles up you do not get a profile (at this resolution) of even a 4 mile high mountain. Not that this isn't a great picture, but definitely from an airplane.

[Bushcat]

notachance, you great maroon, this was taken from the ISS. It's a popular and common NASA image.

[Noah]

Mt. Everest is about 5.5 miles hight. A Boeing
777's cruising altitude is about 1 mile higher
than that at about 6.6 miles. Some business jets
have a ceiling of nearly 10 miles. The SR-71
Blackbird reached 16 miles of sustained flight.
The ISS orbits at about 250 miles -- about 45
times the altitude of Mt. Everest. If you consider
that we are looking down on Mt. Everest then the
picture must be higher than a typical passenger
jet. But the picture does not appear to be MUCH
higher. Find points of reference to guesstimate
how much higher. The picture seems to be taken
from the North-West looking toward the South-East.
The Rongbuk Monastery is near where the two
valleys meet to form a V in the middle of the
picture. The valley that heads straight up toward
Mt. Everest is roughly 10 miles long. So... I
dunno -- I guess maybe 30 to 60 miles for the
apparent altitude of the camera. Even if it was
only 15 miles (3 times the height Mt. Everest)
then that would still put this picture at the
record-setting altitudes of exotic aircraft. So
it's a good bet that this picture was NOT taken
from a plane. On the other extreme if the apparent
height of the camera were 60 miles (more than 10
times higher than Mt. Everest) then that would
still be far below the altitude of the ISS. None
of the photos taken of the ISS with the Earth in
the background show anywhere near this level of
ground detail.

So, you conclude they probably used a small
telescope to take this picture aboard the ISS...
You need about a 10X magnification to get an
apparent altitude of 25 miles, but that's looking
straight down. The ISS was probably at an angle so
they would need something a little bigger. You can
get 500mm f/4 telephoto lenses cheap compared to
what NASA probably paid.

[jackBean]

Nicepost dude, well done and well written.

Jiff
www.privacy.es.tc

[Craig]

Annotations of Mount Everest see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Himalaya_annotated.jpg

[Res]

That's a pretty cool pic. Hey Bushcat, very observant comment.

[Chris]

Bushcat, you're a genius man. Awesome comment..

[Leandro Tami]

@Res, @Chris: I think you mean Noah.

[rob]

If a picture's worth a thousand words, Noah's post almost paid for this one...

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