Live video of our Earth from orbit (from the International Space Station or ISS) Earth Surface from Orbit
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx
And here’s the ISS ground tracking position to you can tell where on the earth it is. http://iss.astroviewer.net/
After you watch for a while you will notice the “real time” images lags behind the actual position of the Space Station by a minute or so.
If you see a nice but still image with a large logo in the upper left corner – that means the camera is off line for the moment. Sometimes it will come back in a moment, other times it may be offline for a hour or more. NASA could be using the bandwidth for a conference or sometimes they just turn it off when the IIS is on the night side.
I first wrote about a dedicated TV Channel with full time video from orbit in about 1989. Later Al Gore picked up the idea, but never did anything notable with it.
This is OK, but not even near the high quality we all know is possible. (Hello NASA, its OK to put an unprotected lens in space, you don’t need to shoot through windows — there’s very little mud kicked up by the ISS.)
So now that this first experiment is operating – maybe we can get an even better Version 2.
In any case, I bet I get less work done when it is over an area I like 🙂