Each week, Spatial Source finds the best that the internet has to offer.
A satellite captured the serendipitous moment its fellow satellites rocketed to space from Earth below it. A cubesat happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture video from space of the moment a Soyuz rocket sent 73 satellites flying into space last week. Snapping one photo every second, the tiny Dove satellite caught two and a half minutes of the Soyuz rocket’s flight shown in the above GIF. [The Verge]
This week, a Boeing Dreamliner drew a Boeing Dreamliner 42,000 feet up in the air. How? It flew nonstop for 18 hours along a route which looks like an airplane when traced on a digital map. And the popular flight tracking site Flightradar showed the feat live. Welcome to the geoawesome world of GPS doodles- a whole new artform! [Geoawesomeness]
It’s not about where to go to see the upcoming eclipse (August 21st, 2017) -it’s where do you see the best maps that’s interesting. That’s Map of the Week compiled the growing list of Where to See the Best Eclipse Maps. [Map of the Week]
We’ve been picking up strange signals, discovering possibly habitable planets, and in general starting to feel a little bit hopeful about the possibility of life in some recognizable form elsewhere — perhaps a lot of elsewheres — in the universe. Now, though, like a splash of cold water to the face, a new study suggests that there may not, in fact, be life-sustaining liquid water out there. Earth remains our only home. [Big Think]
Old meets new; Subway meets the Roman Empire. Cartographer Sasha Trubetskoy didn’t set out to create a subway-style map of the Roman roads of Britain—not specifically. He had seen plenty of fantasy transit maps online and, he says, “I figured I could do better.” He just needed a subject, and he landed on ancient Rome, which no one had tackled before, despite its extensive network of roads across its vast empire (see above). [Atlas Obscura]