Gallery: Satellite view of Bahamas Ocean sands

Though you would be forgiven for thinking this picture a work of abstract art, it is actually a photograph of the Bahamas Ocean Sands captured by the Earth-orbiting Landsat 7 satellite.

Ocean currents in the Bahamas made the sand-and-seaweed sculpture in much the same way that winds create sand dunes in the Sahara.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has announced the ten most popular pictures of our home planet from its Image of the Day catalog, the culmination of a user-voted contest marking the tenth anniversary of the observatory’s Web site.

From “The best pictures of Earth: Reader pics of NASA Shots” Gallery, NationalGeographic.com

For full gallery, click HERE

Baby blue whale video

A baby blue whale filmed off Costa Rica may be the first to have been photographed underwater and adds to evidence that a blue whale hot spot in the Pacific Ocean is a birthing ground for the endangered species.

During a January 2008 expedition to the “Dome” (a warm-water region that draws blue whales from hundreds of miles away) the researchers had begun to lose hope of finding a calf. Then two telltale spouts began erupting at the sea surface.

“Oh, tell me that one of them is a small blow, please,” Bruce Mate, of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, says in the documentary.

One of the spouts did turn out to be that of a calf, which approached the research boat and surprising the scientists, given blue whale mothers’ protective reputations.

A photographer and videographer dived in and soon had the visual evidence needed to identify the whale as a baby blue.

From National Geographic. Full article and video HERE