Attendees on the guided tour of the exhibition hear Marcos Alvarez explain. /
Asturian schools participate in the EarthKam program which allows to take real pictures of the planet
Snow on the mountains, the sea with a blanket of clouds, or the three-colored desert, are images of the planet that cannot be seen with one’s feet on the ground. The exhibition “Sky Festival” collects 29 of them, taken from an altitude of 430 kilometers, and displays them in the old school of trade. The exclusivity occurs because the photos are taken by Asturian children who participate in an educational program in the principality.
This project was launched by the first woman in space in the United States, Sally Ride, under the name EarthKam, and came to schools to allow four times a year a group of children from different centers to give the command to take a picture. The camera is placed on the NASA International Space Station. It must be borne in mind that this ship is moving at a speed of 27,500 kilometers per hour, so the accuracy of the shot does not allow mistakes.
The exhibition presents the viewer with the challenge of guessing, with minimal evidence, to which part of the world the picture corresponds to, and, contrary to what it might seem, at first glance, it is not easy to recognize the city of Gijon or the coast of New Zealand.
It also allows a QR code to know all the information provided by the image from where it was taken to when it was taken. “Everyone who visits it understands that we do not know our planet from space,” said Marcos Alvarez, head of the Space Workshops. Realizing this ignorance, Alejandra Huart visited yesterday with her son and is very interested in recreating and thinking about spatial images. This vision “allows us to see ourselves from the outside and see how small we are,” he said at the exhibition.
