1/22/2003: Etna from ISS

[Undertoad]

This Astronomy Pic of the Day beaut is a few weeks old in the queue. It's Mt. Etna, as seen from the International Space Station last fall.

It's striking, partly because we rarely get aerial views like this, space-height views. The APoD has a LARGER version available which is just huge; about 3000x2000 and about a megabyte in size. I took that version and cropped out just the volcano and a section of plume:



By my extremely rough calculations, that image is about 50 miles square. (Interestingly, the whiter smoke at the bottom is coming from forest fires, not the volcano.)

This is actually our fourth Etna-related image. Over a year ago we had a satellite view of the same kind of thing, but this eruption was a little bigger it seems... some of the ash from it landed in Libya.

Following that satellite image, HB pointed out that Etna was in severe violation of the Kyoto protocol, and the 50 miles square tells you just how much. A lot. This is one dirty smokestack.