New Video Features Amazing Views of Minnesota From Space
The crew on the International Space Station was busy Monday taking a cool video with some amazing views of Minnesota.
NASA says the International Space Station has been orbiting planet Earth for 20 years now. And the website ISS-ABOVE has been tracking its movements and providing some way-cool pictures and videos from the space station as it looks down on our planetary home.
According to the ISS-ABOVE website, it's actually 'a single-board computer that calculates where the International Space Station is at all times. It's hooked up to a TV and it displays screens with information that show you where the ISS is and when you can see it in your skies,' the site says.
So eagle-eyed viewers across Minnesota perked right up Monday when ISS-ABOVE and its video camera was honed in on the North Star State and ended up taking a cool video of the Land of 10,000 Lakes-- from about 260 miles up.
The conditions were perfect Monday-- which doesn't often happen-- meaning things were clear across the parts of Minnesota the ISS was orbiting above, which made the video possible.
If you're going to get technical, the video was recorded beginning at 9:22 am CDST Monday, October 18th, and starts when the ISS was actually above extreme eastern South Dakota. You can first make out what I'd guess is the Red River, and then as the ISS moves east, you can make out some other notable Minnesota natural landmarks. Keep watching and you can pretty clearly see Mille Lacs, the city of Duluth, the North Shore, and, of course, Lake Superior.
If you were in the part of Minnesota in the path of the ISS Monday and happened to look up, the ISS site says you might have been able to see it as it tracked across the Minnesota sky. 'At certain times of day (around dawn and dusk) the ISS looks like a very bright star moving steadily across the sky in 6-10 minutes,' ISS-ABOVE said.
Check out the video below and see how many Minnesota landmarks you can make out. And, if you've still got the itch to see things from above, keep scrolling to see how many Rochester landmarks you can identify too!
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