New York has never looked more like inflamed genitalia.

@EpponneeRae: That's debatable.

Whatever happened to the fine art of narration? Imagine this guy chirping "...Breath deep the gathering gloom..."

Love that they built the special camera out of spare parts for the space station. When something blows out and they're yelling "get the thing! get the thing!" and "the thing" just happens to be welded* into this contraption, boy they sure are going to laugh about that! Unless they're losing breathable air supply too quickly to laugh. Which I'm sure is what happens. I've seen many movies with astronauts in them and I stayed awake through almost all of them. They should really get pictures of that huge star baby, while they're up there.

I have a feeling these dudes would get along with the steam punk guy who retro-fitted that telegraph to read RSS.

Cool project, though. Wish my life was going to produce something as relevant.

*Can you weld in space?

You can weld in space only if you wear a space helmet AND welder's mask, and not the kind of mask you wear to a costume party dressed as a welder. Oh and remember everything in space happens in slow motion, so be careful. If you get a spark on your sleeve, you can't just reflexively bat at it with your other hand, because of the slow motion.

I wonder how they convinced Stephen Hawking to narrate?

@Linkletter'sDaughter: Ok, so now my question is, when you are welding in space, is the music you hear the Blue Danube, since you are doing technology things in a gravity-free environment a la Space Odyssey, or the song that opens that movie where the chick is a welder by day and a stripper by night?

Do like this. Funny it opens with Chicago, and if they zoomed in we might have seen the Google truck.

@Zorica: As there is no Earth "day" and "night" in space, the Flashdance music could be debilitating and confusing, causing space bends. My suggestion would be Vangelis, painless but strange, like sedation dentistry.

He sounds like my high school astronomy teacher.

@Linkletter'sDaughter: The narrator is a NASA astronaut, right? I guess they don't teach voice and diction along with Astrophysics and Intro to String Theory. Imagine that.

@psych101: Well, it's just that they thought to put professionally composed and appropriate music under the narration...why not have the astronaut just wack away a little "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on his Casio while talking? After all, he's an astronaut, and so must be qualified to score a little space music, no?

It's so elemental but stunningly beautiful. Thanks, Nick. Really.

Flying over New York at night, going from DC to Hartford, CT, is one of the most beautiful and moving things I have ever seen. You have to imagine it from my perspective though, as someone who doesn't live in New York and often longs to, who is fully steeped in American culture and images of this city, looking down, craning my neck to trace the outline of Manhattan--so familiar and yet so foreign. The colors of a city, any city, glowing by night, seen from above, are breathtaking. The color and shape of New York is legendary.

@apostrophina: For a couple of years I lived overseas, things were tight and I wasn't very mobile. Eventually I got back here for a visit, though, and on the return flight, taking off at 8pm in the winter, I happened to have a window seat. I was reading a book but glanced out the window at a key moment during takeoff, saw all of my places glowing in the dark, and burst into tears. It says as much about my personal circumstance as it does about New York. But the comment in the post about the necklace is apt. This city is a jewel.

@apostrophina: and the blank emptiness of everywhere else is heartbreaking ... the single strings of lights along the lonely highways

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.