Big Eye

[danalwyn]

Some pictures are stunning. Some pictures are terrifying. I find this particular composite image to be both:




That storm has already hit the Philippines. We already know what it's done. But sometimes it's impossible for the human mind to comprehend just how large things are. The true scope of nature's power exceeds the human scope of comprehension by such a magnitude that what is going to be profoundly devastating becomes merely pretty.

(Image is from Goddard, composite from NASA, EUMETSAT, and the JMA, from flickr)

Comments

[silverjackal]

Oh my! That is *incredible*. It looks to be the width of the entire Indian subcontinent. D: You'll never catch me doubting the scale and might of nature, and still, I am awed by this. Thank you for sharing it.

[danalwyn]

It's just hard sometimes to remember how large a storm really is. Here we're used to ones that come and go in a day at normal speeds, but even if the whole storm was going at sixty miles an hour it would take a long time for that to pass over anything. It's just a different scale.

[quicksilver_ink]

When I first got interested in astronomy, I read things about the gigantic storms on Jupiter and and Saturn and Neptune and never really could grock the size; sure, they'd say X miles across, but that didn't seem to mean much.

Seeing a storm that's the size of India? Yeah, that means a lot more. And also leaves me frankly amazed there is anything left in its wake.

[danalwyn]

The storms on Jupiter and Saturn are so large that we lose all frame of reference. I'm not sure we can even comprehend the idea of a storm so large that our planet can get lost in them. It just doesn't seem very comprehensible.

The Earth however seems just to endure.