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Most Detailed Image Of Earth Yet
TomDM writes "BBC News has a story on how scientists created the most accurate and detailed image of our planet yet, composing the image from satellite data, and adjusting it for the correct colours. "
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..suprised to find out that the Earth, is in fact, flat.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have been taking pictures using my Kodak Advantix camera of the ground in 4ftx3ft areas and collaging them into a large, detailed map of the Earth's surface.
Because I am trying to keep this as up to date as possible, I reshoot any areas that change. I haven't gotten very far, mostly my yard and part of the driveway.
And yet, instead of showing the actual image, they decide to give us "A typical view of our planet" (probably because they had the clipart handy).
Got Rhinos?
I wish we had access to that kind of data, as well as elevation data for the whole planet.
Corelating both, we could have a planetwide flying simulator, or even submarine simulator.
Then add the higher resolution satellite pictures to enrich the places where you have them, and we'd soon have a hugely interesting data set!
I did a proto browser like that years ago, correlating the ghhs coastline data set and the etopo5 elevation map (at 1 degree resolution; nothing). And thats still the only vectorial data you can get covering the whole planet, for free.
it's OUR planet anyway, why can't they release the data? it's not like the resolution is enought to have any military value anyway!
Wouldn't this have been a lot easier?
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
They just ran apt-get to get it! Didn't they?
This is an image of what the ground looks like from the ground, not from space. Path radience effects the eye just like a camera. Not explained well in the article...
That is messed up. The have a link to the high res version of the "old view", but no links to the high res versions of the new-improved image. Does anyone have any links to a larger version?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Joe: Uh-oh...better call the boss.
Got Rhinos?
Now, the picture is nice and all, but when can the average joe go for a vacation to the space station? Aren't they done yet. Come on, the travel industry desparately needs a new market :). Oh wait, that's that's a big suicide bomb waiting to happen.
Where can I get it in 2,048 by 1,536 resolution??
And here is the story where they got all the idea for their story from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/08/143217 &mode=thread
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Look at the NASA MODIS site here if you want to actually see the pictures...
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
+1 Funny
Come on guys, this was a joke. Don't you get it (any true google-lovin' geek would)?
Wow! This must be a PERSONAL letter, just for me!
Nasa has some High Res versions here.
;)
Yes.. you too can download a 410MB TIFF of the earth
I want a poster for my wall.
That would be rad.
Even better if they print it with light sensitve ink.
So when I turn out the lights I get the night version.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
...the holy grail of Risk boards.
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
This goes to the directory of the newest images.
Mmm cheese, everyone likes cheese, except possibly Leo Howell (leo@marvin.dyndns.org), but he's just wierd.
:)
This reminds me of the monty python cheese shop sketch, very funny.
I think my favorite cheese is probably parmesan, so good on pasta with just olive oil and pepper. YUM
It's an obvious fake. Look at it! There are no lines to show you where the states are!
I believe that this all stems from work done by NASA's
Blue Marble project.
If you go to the site, they have some great, high-resolution images of the earth during the day, night, by hemisphere, etc. A great source for desktops or just browsing for fun.
I believe this is the same project that was reported February 8th as "Blue Marble".
Anyone who wants to use this for xplanet (a very cool globe program for *nix) can. There's a nice 2400x1200 version floating around somewhere, that combined with Hans Ecke's scripts, will create just awsome images for your desktop.
And did win it on merit. The use of tactics in a style of race where collisions and falls are common. Did you watch the heats??
And if you want to bitch some more, how about these additional facts:
1/ Steve's day job is manufacturing the skates that his competitors used.
2/ The head judge who ruled that there would be no re-run was Australian and is a long time family friend of Steve.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This whole thing smells like PR for NASA so they can get an adequate budget. Using IR cameras to measure global warming, measuring the changes in the icecaps, that makes sense. But a big dorm-room poster? This is right up there with putting a camera on the Mars rover. Neat, but what did it accomplish?
What bugs me is that the Earth is made to look prettier than it is. Where are the cities? If you didn't know better, you'd think the planet's one big grassy plain with a desert in the middle. It's clear they made cosmetic touch-ups, right down to the cloud photos they chose to make the photo look more "typical."
And while it's great to see the planet without any clouds, if by "clouds" you mean "smog and pollution," then you might as well be editing out cities. You just don't end up with a meaningful view of the planet if you leave out how we've changed it.
This doesn't appear to be a useful, or even honest, project. It's more of a publicity stunt.
Teaching, coding, coffee, revolution.
So, now we slashdot the earth????
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
Last one out, turn off the light
Hmm, joke aside, this sentence sends a thrill down my spine, thinking of the day when human kind has screwed the planet up so badly that we have to move on.
I don't know about you, but last time I checked, Earth is still the best place to live. So let's take care of our home, while we still can.
Japan is lit mor brightly than Las Vegas, or anywhere else in the word for that matter. Talk about population density.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
you'll see me having breakf...
Wait a minute..
what Pamela Andersons navel looks like from orbit
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Or you'll be first against the wall when they rule the world!
But it's also incredibly apocalyptic, to me.
If my little 75-watt porch light contributes to light pollution enough to be visible from space, it really makes tangible the effect of the other kinds of pollution that that light must create. A tiny bit of coal here, a puff of gas there; without my (or anyone else's) thinking about it, it turns into something that's fucking visible from space.
So when the caption is "Last one out, turn off the light", all that does is drive home for me how even the tiniest decisions I make -- leaving the porch light on all night so robbers can't steal my luxuries -- affect the whole world.
Blimey, we're all killing eachother: cheerio, last one out, be a dear, turn off the light, eh?
...the puff of smoke coming up from the servers at NASA.
--jw
For the record, if I'd known NASA was working on this, I would've reseeded my lawn. I didn't think anyone but the neighbors would notice the dead patches. My apologies...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I submitted these pictures and the official NASA site some time ago, check it out. Still awesome pics...
A slow Aussie skater getting gold on his own merits, than a pair or Russian figure skaters who have a French connection.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
this is all a marvel of modern technology and all, but who really cares what hue of blue the ocean is at a specific point? maybe biologists or meteorologists, but there are more useful things other than color that they use. so, while neat, I fail to see the practicality in this.
So there's a rectangular version of the "most accurate map" on the BBC site...
But --- what's this ?
Oh my god, I don't exist!
They appear to have forgotton New Zealand...
(also, amazingly, someone has filled in the ocean between Alaska and Russia... East meets west!)
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
So much for detail....
...to learn that there are in fact many people who can use a computer and can't spell a single word in English.
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
From: eng
Subj: 1055CM STILL out of ink
Hey guys, the 36-inch color inkjet printer still seems to be out of ink. I thought you guys were going to come out and replace the cartridge two hours ago.
314-15-9265
I have a picture of the earth at night, with all the lights on [of course, it had to be time rendered, as the whole earth is not lit at the exact same time]. You can download it for free from here, and by the way, this is the same image at the bottom of the article, but it got my attention because it's my background right now [21" + 17" and still looks great]
Don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
conesus.com
Want to see a living example of the difference between North and South Korea? Find South Korea on the nighttime map from NASA. Notice how it's separated from China by a dark gap? That gap is North Korea.
Americans can read maps fine, and can locate Australia. Sure, Americans don't follow the news from Australia with the same intensity as Australians follow news from the US. But the US is 10X the population/wealth/news-worthiness of AUS. How well do people from AUS follow the news from countries of similar population/wealth/news-worthiness that are on the other side of the globe? Can you name any political figures in the Ukraine? Are you up on the seperatist movement on Faroe Island? Can you name a city in Slovenia? This is one American who thinks that people from small countries who expect Americans to understand their small country as well as they understand the US are dopes.
A proper background for my 500-display infinite reality supercomputer!
-S
you make yourself look like your overly judgemental and have waay too much time on your hands.
Its just a message board...
If all else fails, Type "Format C:"
Um, sorry to object, but what idiot defined this as offtopic? It wasn't that funny, granted (sorry Trogre! :) - but offtopic? Some people are too stupid to moderate.
go to This web site [http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/]. They make excellent desktop pictures! BlackGriffen Basking in the glow of the karma whoring light... :D
I didn't say Understand, I said Locate.
I may not be able to name political figures from the Ukraine, or cities in Slovenia, or the political situation in the Faroe islands, But I do know where they are.
And how well do you think that Americans actually know their own country? For instance: The part of US banks and companies in building up cheap foreign (to the US) steel production to the detriment of the domestic market? Or the extent of poverty in WVa? Or the how Dubya intends to finance his renewable energy policy?
These are all domestic US issues that I know would fly right past the majority of US population.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Would be cool if someone would use these images to generate Earth 1.0 a la Snowcrash, for those who haven't read Snowcrash, Earth 1.0 was a utility that gave live feeds from satellites, you could see the clowds all over earth but also you could zoom in very deep and see people move around.
The last part is not feasable ofcourse because the static earth-images would be sitting on your drive, eating up a lot of space. But lower detail satellite images from the internet could be used to dynamically generate the cloud surface on top of the high detail images so zooming would be possible and it would almost be like Earth 1.0
I once saw a simular app in java but the graphics were quite bad.
Am I the only person that thinks things like this make cool posters? Any idea if you can buy one? Where?
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Go get Xplanet, from xplanet.sourceforge.net, and the 2048x1024 JPEGs from visibleearth.nasa.gov, and hack a couple of scripts to run the thing from cron, on the root window.
You'll get the coolest desktop background. The "land surface, ocean color, and sea ice" image is beautiful; the the "city lights" image looks rather false, though. Don't get the clouds image, you can get "live" clouds with a bit more hackery --think of it as a light version of Hiro's "Earth" widget in Snow Crash :-)
I wrote a script for getting a view from an viewpoint that goes round the earth every 6 hours and update the screen every 5-10 min. I wrote another to fetch an image of the clouds from the Xplanet page, which is updated every 3 hours, IIRC, from real data from the weather satellites (details and tips on the Xplanet page, or you can mail me if you want my scripts).
Check out a screenshot of my laptop's background, using this images (low quality scaled pic, sorry, we're very bandwidth challenged). Anyway, it sure beats a picture of the cats :-)
For anyone who is in the know and has downloaded the high resolution pictures, can you explain what those glowing blue patches you see by the coasts are? They're especially prominent in the one with clouds, but there's a pretty bright one off the coast of Cuba and Florida too in the loudless one.
Considering this is supposed to be true color, I'm really curious, since I've never seen anything like these in normal pictures of the Earth from space. In the cloudy one it almost looks like someone spilled radioactive waste all over South America and Europe or something....
The explanation is: NASA didn't want to direct their cameras on Mordor (which we now know is locate in New Zealand) since Sauron might have taken control of the satellites. Where would we be then? I applaud NASA's foresight in this matter.
:-)
well...
alright, actually they're only cropped off on the BBC site, the original pictures are complete, so blame BBC
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
is the funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in months.
Best Slashdot Co
I totally agree with you, however I dont think that spelling corrections on a message board will cause any changes towards the better. Since it is up to that individual to govern how their own actions. If a person does not care about the quality of their communication, then there is very little that others can say to make a difference. Especially since, you are the only person capable of changing you.
If all else fails, Type "Format C:"
http://flightgear.org/Downloads/world-scenery.html
Flightgear is available (GPL) for windows and Linux. You can in fact put whatever pictures you want on the topography.
I believe MS FlightSimulator 2000 (and older) have world maps you can fly around in.
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission
Some parts of the US are already available
This image appeals to kids and adults alike, as we can now safely assume that Waldo has been found in the Canadian wilderness of the Yukon, putting an end to the life-long debate as to the answer to the famous-but-overused question.
-J Steele-
It would be nice if you guys knew a little more of the huge country north of you. Our population may not be large but there is a large lack of Canadian knowledge in the US.
There was a show put on here call Talking to American. Absolutely hillarious. I thought it was funny that Harvard professors and students could be convinced that it would be a good idea for our Prime Minister (Jean Poutine as you guys may know him) to stop the the seal slaughter in Saskatchewan.
- Cuyler
Is this the way the earth would look in spring time for all regions, or in the wet time for all reagions, or in the summer for all regions, or when there is the most photosynthesis for all regions? Remember it's summer south of the equater when it is winter north of the equator. In central brazil it's the rainy season but in the north east it's the dry season. So what does it mean?
Well, it's cool anyway.
Nate
The oceans of the earth are all one color, Dark Blue! It looks like the north pole is also Dark Blue. Everything else is either green or brown, with antartica and iceland being pretty white.
I wish my vision was as good as yours... man, cause all i see are specks...
.
.
oh and is that my dog? Naah, she wouldnt be on the roof with an "ELP ME" sign.
If all else fails, Type "Format C:"
We've got troops in half the world, so the relative importance to an American of, say, Slovenia, is much higher than to an Aussie.
The flipside of your argument is that our responsibility to be aware of the world is proportional to our influence over it. Living in a democracy, it's no excuse to say "I never approved of this atrocity". So it starts to be pretty important that people know what's going on, say in Uzbekistan. And who we are going to bed with there. Many in the rest of the world are pissed off/amazed at how we allow our government to send military aid to regimes who are conducting mass murder (e.g. Turkey), or train/give loans to security forces in repressive, fanatical regimes (Saudi Arabia). They rightly conclude that popular ignorance lets our govt. get away with murder. So the responsibility to be more informed than everyone else is on our shoulders. In this respect, it doesn't matter how much geography a Canadian knows.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I may not know much about Canada now... but I will after I drive up there.
*grin* Gotta love curiosity
If all else fails, Type "Format C:"
I have a map of the United States. It's full scale. It says on the side: "one inch equals one inch." Last Summer I folded it.
-- Steven Wright
- passion
Hive mind looks at the ground. Cool!
Do that? Ants do that. Ants do that. Ants do that.Is this what ants do? Ants do that.
Ants do that. Do that.
Ants do that.
Ants do that.
Ants! Do that!
Do that? Ants do that.
Ants do that.
Ants do that.
I dont think your being very fair to us. There are plenty of Americans who know where Austrailia is, and many of us dream of visiting there. So please dont be so quick to group us all into one stereotype
I even know the correct pronunciation of Austrailia... my friends on mIRC told me... its spelled OZstrailia.
*smile*
If all else fails, Type "Format C:"
I work for a gis company and we are starting to see more and more 1 meter res satellite imagery. This is not that great of an accomplishment. The 1 meter stuff probably exists, just not public yet. cool nonetheless...
"I can see my house from here!"
Well, somebody had to say it.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/Blue Marble/
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Imagine being able to start with that gorgeous Blue Marble image and zoom smoothly all the way down to aerial imagery with 1-4m^2/pixel resolution...
That's just about the time when we started to realize we were fucking up and put some land away as parks and wilderness. There may indeed be more trees now than 100 years ago, but far fewer acres are left unpaved..
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
On a similar note, a friend recently introduced me to a cool little program called Earthviewer 3D. It is a (sort of) 3D globe that you can zoom in on smoothly, gives you very nice resolution in many areas (you can see individual cars on the Bay Bridge in S.F.). They have a free 14 day trial you can get here. Unfortunately, looks like it is Windows only. And I have no idea how much it costs. And it takes a decent 3D card. And probably a decent internet connection, since it downloads all the textures continously. But other than that, it is pretty fun.
I thought it was visible from space?
Some time ago James Hastings-Trew put together a very nice Earth map from public domain data he found over the net.
:-)
Earth's free, as in beer, of course
I can see my house from here!
For those interested, I've been doing the same
thing, only with auroral data added to the mix. Try here (Go down and click on the VIS or WIC links at the bottom of the page),
or here.
If you want to know about the code, go here.
This might be an older version of it, but it's good enough for me.
I really enjoyed this story when I read it almost two weeks ago: Blue Marble [slashdot.org]
Sorry bout the repost...IE doesn't preserve data fields when using the back button.
"The Society asserts that the Earth is flat and has five sides, that all places in the Universe named Springfield are merely links in higher-dimensional space to one place, and that all assertions are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true false and meaningless in some sense. "
What's this Submit thingy do?
EOM
-no broken link
Poemo makes a good point that Americans need to understand best other countries where US or citizen action could bring the most good or harm. So we need to understand Slovenia, why we have troops there, and which way their guns need to point. I disagree that Canadians do not need to understand as well, because every individual Canadian can have as much influence on the world as someone from the US. But what, really, does someone from the US need to underatand about Canada? 1 - We never fight wars against Canada; 2 - We have law enforcement cooperation with Canada; 3 - We have free trade with Canada; 4 - Canadians consider themselves better educated than us when they are not. Once in a while, Canada will tackle an issue (Hing Kong immigration, health care) in a different way and Americans can learn from Canada's experience. But in general, detailed knowledge of Canada is useless trivia to someone from California.