Happy Valley (PSU) From the ISS, 261 Miles Up!

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PSU's Happy Valley From Space (ISS) EarthKAM

My 8th grade Earth Science students requested this image from the International Space Station's EarthKAM camera during the April, 2016 EarthKAM Mission.  During the time of the photograph, a cool, clear high pressure system was situated over the northeastern United States, making for excellent viewing opportunities.  If you teach science, the EarthKAM program is a free NASA resource you really should look into.  More info can be found here: https://www.earthkam.org.  The actual image is hosted on the EarthKAM servers, which are managed by the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  If you click the picture link, there are opportunities to download this an other images at various resolutions:   http://images.earthkam.org/main.php?g2_itemId=588076  By clicking the "next image" and "previous image" buttons, you can sometimes view excellent overlapping images taken by the ISS as it orbited Earth at an astounding speed of 17,000 mph, close to 5 miles a second!  There are at least two April, 2016 EarthKAM images which caught the PSU campus and surrounding countryside.  Plenty of other excellent pictures of Earth from this and other EarthKAM missions going back nearly a decade.  Check them out in the EarthKAM image galleries.

One of the more interesting things that you can do with these EarthKAM images is to compare them with the images hosted by Google Earth to see change over time.  To make that easier, here is a Google Maps link to the EarthKAM image discussed in this post  (works best with Chrome browser).

Credit: 
NASA
Date Taken: 
Friday, April 15, 2016