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x0x Turkey from space
[See more at: http://www.TurkRadio.us/uzay/ ]
x0x Turkey from space By Prof. Dr. USTUN AYDINGOZ Its location on the Earth's surface and a varied geography render Turkey one of the most photogenic countries when viewed from orbit around our planet. O ne of my fondest childhood dreams was to meet moonwalking astronauts. In fact, I would have preferred going myself to the Moon, but I soon realized that this was not possible in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it was significant enough for me to meet a handful of people who had been there. Of all the people who had ever lived, only twenty-four men had been to the vicinity of the Moon; half of those had made it to the lunar surface. Those twelve, who were my contemporaries, were the first humans ever to look at their home planet from the surface of another celestial body. During the last fifteen years, I have had the privilege to meet in person some of those astronauts. Unbeknownst to me earlier, however, this would soon lead me to a revelation about my own country. A WORK OF ART Early in the 1990s, I was interviewing John Young at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Then in his early sixties, Young was still a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) astronaut. He was the most frequent traveler to space by then. Of his six space missions, two were to the Moon, during one of which he had actually landed on the Moon as the commander of Apollo 16. Two of his earlier flights were during Project Gemini, precursor of the Apollo lunar missions. His final two flights were on the space shuttle. This experienced astronaut was the commander of the first space shuttle mission in April 1981. At one point during the interview, I asked Young a casual question about any special observations he might have had of Turkey from orbit, and his response astonished me. Young was not an astronaut to review the basics of Turkey's geography the night before he would sit for an interview with a Turkish journalist. Still, the level of detail about Turkey in his answer was intriguing to me: "We have some great photographs of Turkey. There are some very rich mineral resources in Turkey. I think you are the world's leading exporter of chromium, which is a very important metal in our business, aerospace... The mountain ranges are just beautiful all over Turkey. There are a lot of very interesting places in Turkey that would be worth looking at... The archeological sites, the straits, the sea currents off the Aegean coast, Cyprus... That would be worth putting in a book some time..." At this point in the interview, John Young called NASA's Public Affairs Office for a photograph, which was duly brought to my attention at the end of our talk. This photograph from a space shuttle flight featured the Gulf of Antalya on the southern (Mediterranean) coast of Turkey and the nearby Lakes Region inland. I was so fascinated and overwhelmed by the photograph that I decided right then and there to search for whatever images of Turkey had been obtained from the space shuttle. During the course of subsequent years, I searched astronaut photography of Earth (a database of several hundred thousand images) for views of Turkey and its environs. From among thousands of images, whenever I ran into an image showing Turkey my heart beat faster and occasionally my eyes filled with tears... Some of those photographs had such a poetic beauty that they were like the art work of a consummate painter. THE HUMAN FACTOR To me, one of the factors rendering the images in these pages so significant is that they were taken not by unmanned satellites but by humans like you and me. The photographs you see here were taken personally by astronauts either on board one of the United States space shuttles (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour) or in a space station (the International Space Station or the now-defunct Russian Mir space station). In other words, you yourself would have seen these very sights should you have had the possibility of ascending several hundred kilometers above Earth. Hence the human factor in these images--although no human is visible on the surface of Earth. Many of the photographs taken by astronauts have been put into these pages just as they were taken. That is, they have not been rotated to conform to the concept of atlas maps (i. e., north should be at the top and east should be to the right). Actually, astronaut photography of Earth's surface is quite a spontaneous undertaking in that the images usually have no concern with fitting into the directional patterns dictated by humans! Besides, the view is oblique (i. e., not vertical) in many images. However, many unmanned observation satellites take photographs of whatever there is directly below them. In addition, the colors of the images in these pages are real to the extent the preservation media (film or digital media) permit. This may not, however, be the case with satellite imagery where the images are sometimes "enhanced"--and false colors used--for remote sensing in order to obtain detailed data in research fields like mining, geology, oceanography. TURKEY: A PHOTOGENIC COUNTRY While searching for astronaut photography of Turkey from orbit, I browsed through images of many fascinating parts of our home planet. Soon, however, I came to realize that Turkey is one of the most photogenic countries on the Earth's surface. The combination of so many distinct geographic features within a single country is a rare occurrence. No other country has a sea completely surrounded by land, for instance. Nor is there another one with two major straits. On the one hand, Africa and the Sahara are closer to Turkey than many think them to be; on the other, the Caucasus Mountains and the Russian steppes beyond are not too far away. Historically two very important rivers carve beautiful valleys in eastern-southeastern Turkey whilst the lacelike contours of the Aegean coastline offer a visual feast for the space voyager. Great Mount Agri displays its majesty even from a height of hundreds of kilometers, and all the while the island of Cyprus, with its interesting shape, is but one step away from Turkey. Your gaze is fixed on the different colors of the lakes, which are all printed indiscriminately pale blue on atlas maps, in the Lakes Region in Western Anatolia. You become absorbed in the plankton blooms in the Black Sea off the coast of Samsun... You see contrails from airplanes passing over Turkey and discern some of the Turkish cities, the two bridges spanning the Bosporus, many highways, and most major airports and harbors. But you cannot see any humans... Or so you think at first. You soon come to realize that we, the people of Turkey and her neighbors, are all there... Ustun Aydingoz is the author and designer of the book, Turkey from Space as Viewed by Astronauts, which was recently published by Is Bank Culture Press in two separate volumes in Turkish and English. |
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