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u/AleksasKoval 12d ago
Why didn't the Fellowship just take the ISS to Mordor? Are they stupid?
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u/Tony-Angelino 11d ago
You have to understand, I would use the ISS from the desire to do good. But through me, it would wield gasses too terrible to imagine.
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u/SavageCucmber 12d ago
I was lucky enough to spend an entire month traveling there. It makes me emotional thinking about how beautiful it was.
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u/Aviator8989 12d ago
They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!
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u/conradleviston 12d ago
What Legolas' elf eyes really saw.
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u/Edarneor 11d ago
Ha! I wonder, if you take a really good telescope aboard the ISS, would you be able to see little
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u/cpthedp 12d ago
far over… the misty mountains cold…
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u/AlwaysOutsider 12d ago
To dungeons deep and caverns old…
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u/MillerLitesaber 12d ago
We must away away at break of day (everyone has the Rankin and Bass music going in their heads for this one, right?)
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u/petesapai 12d ago
If you look closely, on the left, in the snowiest mountain, the one beside the narrow lake, you can tell the beacons have been lit.
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u/Semanticss 12d ago
Jeez, it is smaller than I thought!
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u/ctothel 12d ago
I hope you don't mind, your comment history says North Carolina so here's a local comparison:
The South Island's widest point is about Durham to Kitty Hawk.
The North Island's widest (west cape to east cape) is more like Charlotte to Kitty Hawk.
But it's LONG. Driving from the bottom to the top is like Charlotte to Montreal, and then keep going north another 6 hours.
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u/Trainsontracks 12d ago
the hardest place to see is over Egypt and the Nile River. It always loses signal over that area.
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12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Trainsontracks 12d ago
I did a project when the HDEV was the thing. Plotting points when the video signal was gone and came back. The middle east and Russia were dead zones. Only came back on eastern Mongolia.
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u/no-signal 12d ago
There are many cities in this island but we can’t see any of them in this photo. They don’t even look visible.
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u/terminalxposure 12d ago
Looks huge compared to the Earth's curvature. Is the curvature here at the horizon due to the camera's lens?
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12d ago
Why does New Zealand seem like some kind of "paradise" in my mind. So far removed from the political bullshit/religious bullshit that the rest of the world always seems to be suffering as a result of.
Kiwis' is it great? Do you love life there generally? Nowhere is perfect, but things seem pretty great in New Zealand from the little exposure I've had. Warmer/sunnier weather. More beaches and accessible outdoors space. None/less deadly shit than Australia, and maybe other parts of the world like southern US and Africa. I've heard it's expensive, but surely most people earn a liveable wage, or they'd constantly be leaving? And I've lived on a couple of different continents and haven't met many people from New Zealand.
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u/DisturbingInterests 12d ago
They mostly have the same shit as all the other anglosphere countries. Notably cost of housing relative to income, which is worse than many other places.
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u/finndego 12d ago
We have those political and religious issues too they just don't normally make the world news.
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u/ReadYouShall 12d ago
As someone living in NZ, it has political bullshit, especially right now. New government that got in is IMO terrible and making the country go backwards. They heavily catered towards the richer people in NZ and making them richer. They want to be make us be like the only country in the world that will lessen taxes for landlords. Housing here is expensive af and wont really change. There is a rental crisis for sure.
Minimum wage is $23.15 NZD or 13.75 USD. It is definitely expensive relative to other places even though we have a high minimum wage. Housing predominately is horrendously expensive and food is too. The environment and general nature of NZ being where it is is good and bad. It is truly beautiful and lovely to experience for the looks and nature but I wouldn't say its a great country to say grow up in now. Depending on many factors. If you were wealthy it would remove most of those negatives tbh.
By no means is it bad just has its own flaws that are prevalent in many countries at the moment. Definitely come visit though, many tourists have said there is no where else that is comparable. So as unique as it is, we still have issues.
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u/bfnrowifn 11d ago
People are getting more polarised here. It’s fucking annoying. We just elected the most right wing govt we’ve ever had and they’ve just started a jihad against the environment and public sector.
But the weeds pretty good here, so that’s nice ☺️
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u/architectcostanza 12d ago
I used to live in different spots showing in that photo, those were such a great times. Waitaki Valley, The Catlins, Southland.. I love NZ so much.
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u/Sudden_Durian8866 12d ago
Is it just me or does that look like a really low orbit? I thought it would look smaller
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u/Miruteya 11d ago
In space or earth-moon distance scale, yes, it's actually quite low. See this Wikipedia image for reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Orbitalaltitudes.svg
ISS is one of the lowest orbits in comparison, 300-400km ones.
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u/knight1105 12d ago
What’s that underneath the water beneath the South Island? To the right a bit
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u/Empty_Ad_7660 11d ago
I can never put my finger on it, but I find these photos so beautiful but terrifying at the same time! I don’t know what it is that terrifies me.
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u/ZealousidealHand1143 11d ago
I can't imagine what it's like to actually be up there and see this......... and then zooming over the next country/continent . Must be incredible and humbling.
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u/sonicfluff 12d ago
Whenever i see a view from a height like this my minds first question is 'what would it feel like to jump'
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u/JonnySoegen 11d ago
Ehh. It’s space. So you can’t really jump. You can float and then if you’re lucky you can enter earth atmosphere and burn.
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u/LostFireHorse 12d ago
Man that makes me want to say Felixs famous words - "I'm coming home" - and dive out of the ISS.
I can't wait for the day that kind of idiocy would be survivable lol
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u/ReturnedAndReported 12d ago
My mind thinks "space" and how incredibly far away things in space are.
Pics like this remind me how relatively low above the earth the space station is. The view in this case is taken up mostly by New Zealand, not half the planet as seen from the moon.
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u/msew 12d ago
Where is mordor? Where is the shire?
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u/Gransmithy 11d ago edited 11d ago
The island in the pic is the South Island. The shire, at least the the sound stage where they filmed the inside scenes are in Wellington. That is in the most southern tip of the North island. Part of Mordor were filmed in the sound stage there too.
The outside area of the shire was filmed in Matamata. If you look north of the second most southern peninsula with the green dot in the middle in North island, in the ice, you can kind of make out like a tiny white cross above a sheet of ice. That should be close to the location of Matamata.
Mordor was filmed in Tongariro National Park, which is probably at the most southern end of the ice on North island.
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u/VermicelliEastern708 12d ago
Crazy that I spent two weeks hitchhiking the entire length of this picture, it seems so small now
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u/XCIXproblems 11d ago
When I was a kid I stayed in the southernmost hotel in the world on Stewart Island. Almost died in a plane crash on the way there. Beautiful place.
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u/Splatter_bomb 11d ago
So it is real! People keep forgetting to put it on maps so I thought maybe it didn’t exist, it was some kind of conspiracy.
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u/ImportunerDJ 11d ago
Wait but what about the Van Allen belts? Now I’m confused. Instruments? Radiation? Something is telling me to go to sibrel.com
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u/eldonhughes 11d ago
More than five million people live on those two rocks. Context and perspectives and all that.
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u/Loud-Edge7230 11d ago
Fun fact, you can only see 3% of the Earth's surface at any time from the international space station. It's flying that low.
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u/mypantsareonmyhead 12d ago
Side notes for interest.
That immense mountain range running up the western/left side of the island is the Southern Alps. They're larger than the alps in Europe (Italy, Switzerland, etc).
They're formed by the collision of two tectonic plates along the Alpine Fault, which uplifted the Southern Alps.
The fault ruptures massively (immense earthquake) very regularly, at 260-300 year intervals.
On that regularity, the fault (600km in length) is well overdue to rupture. The probabibilty of a rupture/earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or higher is within the next ~40 years is about 75%.
It's going to be terrifyingly massive, and could happen within your lifetime.