About a dozen tight images, mostly from on orbit, looking down at cloud formations:

Boston Globe: The Sky, from Above

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0....

very nice.

Very nice. And I learned something (my bold)...
About time!

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

The BA has linked to these in his blog today. Very nice. I like the spoonbill (at least I think that's what it is) in the second launch shot.

I'm a little surprised at the sesame seed bagels. Wouldn't think they'd want the seeds floating around.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Anyone have any idea what the dot just above the moon is in the last pic on that page? At first I thought it could be an aircraft as it appears to be leaving a contrail, but someone on another forum posted a negative version of the pic which shows at least two other dots leaving trails at exactly the same angle, which would make that unlikely.

Well, I figured it out.

Someone on the other forum tracked down the original picture. Turns out it was taken from the ISS in 2005: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseo...1332045241.tsv

He downloaded what he thought was the original from that site, and.... no mystery objects!

But I noticed that the most obvious dot (just above the moon) WAS there, just visible, on the thumbnail:


And, blowing up the thumbnail and comparing with the relevant section of the high-res pic from the article at the start of this post, it's clear they are the same:


So why is it there in the thumbnail but not in the "original"? Well, notice on the NASA page there are two originals, and the one I'd looked at, ISS010-E-18592_2.JPG, was marked "Updated image for database". The other one, ISS010-E-18592.JPG is actually the unedited original, and the mystery objects are present!

But, it seems they are not real objects at allm but image artifacts. The pic in the Boston Globe article has obviously been cropped and rotated, making it appear that the "contrails" are at a diagonal angle. But in the original, the trails are all totally vertical, i.e. parallel to the sensor edges of the digital camera. As marked up here: http://i31.tinypic.com/2yv00b5.png

The bright dots can't all be stars, as some of them are in front of the moon, so my vote is for hot pixels, which caused charge leakage on the CCD along the rows.

The bird in question is a white ibis, not a spoonbill - but it is still a great shot.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants