Astronomy Picture of the Day (timelapse with Earth rotating)

[eding]

Flying over the north pole at night, my United 777 once flew perfectly anti-rotation for a while, and then non-rotation when over the axis-pole. the moon and stars never moved for over an hour - as the pilot pointed out.

[zephjc]

Hold onto the grass so you don't fall off! :)

[ck2]

Strange how some of those segments made me a little queasy.

[narag]

Beautiful. Our galaxy is pretty. I wish it could be seen a little more like this with the naked eye.

[wedesoft]

Nice idea. But they only used 2D translation and rotation. Ideally they would have used a homography (projective transformation). Unless other effects are ruling the image (radial distortion, atmospheric diffraction) this should lead to a better result.

[dimmuborgir]

The camera is turning at an angular speed of 7.2 × 10^-5 rad/s which is the speed of Earth's rotation.

[jannes]

I'm confused. This is a timelapse video. So shouldn't the camera appear to be turning a little bit faster than that?

[JoeAltmaier]

What was the deal with that laser? What could they possibly be aiming at?

[pjama]

Read about [Adaptive Optics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics) -- The telescope watches the laser beam and corrects for atmospheric distortions.

[maeon3]

Excellent new look that reminds us that the Stars are not spinning. A reminder that we need to get off this spinning rock asap.

[borism]

Excellent new look that reminds us that the Stars are not spinning.

Yes they are.

A reminder that we need to get off this spinning rock asap.

Why?