by G. Jack Urso
From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
In the 1990s, NASA had a cable
television channel, NASA TV (NTV), which, in addition to its regular
programming of educational and news reports, would sometimes just run up to eight hours of Earth views taken by space
shuttle missions of the 1990s. No audio. No commentary. No commercials. No station
breaks. No channel ID announcements. No on-screen watermarks — just hours and
hours of the Earth spinning quite all alone in space. One day in the late 1990s, I taped a long marathon session of Earth views (see the video above from the
Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel).
The six hour-plus video compiles
footage from three shuttle missions and none of the missions are repeated. Title cards appear periodically to indicate which mission or which part
of the Earth the viewer is looking at.
Screen shots from the video.
Shuttle missions used for this
broadcast include (in order of appearance):
- STS-75, February — March 6, 1996, the 19th mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
- STS-78, June 20 — July 7, 1996, the 20th mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
- STS-66, November 3 — November 14, 1994, the 13th mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
It is sobering to see the footage
taken from the Space Shuttle Columbia which would later be destroyed on
February 1, 2003, while returning from its 28th mission (STS-107), killing all
seven astronauts.
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| Moving from the light side to the dark side. Screen shots from the video. |
While writing or working on projects
I would throw the Earth views tape on and put on some Miles Davis or Charles
Mingus, the Missa Luba,
or film soundtracks like those from Planet of the Apes (1968) and Logan’s Run (1976) (see links for articles and music on
Aeolus 13 Umbra).
Although I first got my RCA DVD Recorder + VCR about 2010, I hadn’t got around to moving the full six hour-plus VHS recording to digital until this year — a testament to the endurance of an approximate 27-year-old VHS tape as well as for my long-neglected RCA DVD/VCR recorder. I last used it for in 2015 with the same tape, but recorded only 70 minutes and which I split up into two 35-minute segments and set to music:
Background music is the album Japan: Shakuhach — The Japanese Flute, featuring KÅhachiro Miyata.
Background music includes tracks from
the album 2001: A Space Odyssey, and
the ambient band TUU’s album Migration.
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| Screen shot from the video. |
[Note:
The camera apertures used to photograph the Earth from orbit are set too fast
to catch starlight, which is why no stars can be seen in the background.]
I also used that RCA DVD Recorder +
VCR to copy another NASA-related 6-hour broadcast from VHS, the 25th anniversary
Apollo Moon Landing ABC News compilation, Apollo 11: As It Happened which I recorded off my local PBS
station in 1994. An extremely rare program one would be hard pressed to find
recordings of elsewhere, reinforcing the value of saving old VHS tapes and
converting them to digital.
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| Screen shot from the video. |
After a while, watching the footage
becomes a meditative experience. The busy thoughts of the day running through
my mind suspend themselves as I get lost in the deep and silent blues of the
oceans and the browns and greens of the land contrasting starkly with the inky blackness
of space.
I can’t say whether there is
intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but from this perspective in Earth orbit
it really looks like we are all alone and on our own, which makes the chaos in
the world today all that much more tragic. This wonderful blue and green
miracle we treat so carelessly.
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| Screen shot from the video. |
The video is a bit grainy in places, but, overall, the quality
and the tracking are pretty good for an approximate 27-year-old VHS tape. There
is something about VHS recordings I find “warmer,” to adopt a phrase often used
for vinyl recordings. I don’t need to see every detail in 4K or 5K
high-definition resolution. I’m not watching it for the video quality. It’s an
artifact of the past — my past, tech past, and America’s past.
It’s a reminder of the fragility of
our existence and what an amazing gift we have been given, and one which we continue to ignore.
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| Sunrise — Screen shot from the video. |
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