Slashdot Mirror
Earth as Art
bravehamster writes "There's a new exhibit at the Library of Congress displaying images taken of earth by the Landsat satellites. The exhibit displays satellite photos that have an intrinsic aesthetic quality, showing the beauty of Earth as seen from really far away. There's an article about it on MSNBC here, and don't forget to check out those fjords!"
Especially when it's a painting.
Someone give Slartybartfast a prize...
Those Icelandic fjords have nothing on Norway's award winning fjords.
imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?
The Library of Congress exhibits you.
See if you can find the large 3/4 circle that is eating the smaller circle in the Garden City, KS plot. This is probably the only one that looks more interesting now than it would have before man changed it.
Art is Earth!
earth... imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
Actually, those photos look a lot like abstract paintings (and for once are not symbolic but actually *OF* something!) and are attractive enough that I'd rather look at those in a meuseum than some of the more famous Picaso types.
Fuzdout
..My sig ran away. Has anyone seen my sig?
Earth art is lame. Give me some good old-fashioned rock porn any day!!
Neat pictures, but the screen saver is 16bit and doesn't run on the systems noted. I hope someone updates this.
If only people would look at these images and realise why everyone should chill out and relax.
nich
-- I was going to be a tree huggin hippy but my laptop kept running out of power
37 - what does it stand for really...
As with abstract paintings, any viewer can choose a meaning -- no human artist has designed them.
good, that means i see jesus and/or the devil in every one of the photos.
I get the Slartybartfast reference. I guess what you're really trying to say is that, recognizing the Earth as art would make the Magratheans proud.
:-P )
On second thought, they probably wouldn't care since the program's already cocked up since we're from Golgafringam.
Hey that explains Slashdot! (Re: useless 1/3, self included.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
It's really nice that they are providing poster size prints for download...r eenland_hires.jpg k patok_hires.jpg (I wonder what the red stuff in this one is?)r aq_hires.jpg
Most other places would give you a small thumbnail and ask you to pay for the full size version.
These one's are pretty cool:
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/g
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/a
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/i
?Who controls the past now, controls the future.
Who controls the present now controls the past.?
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/iraq.html
Did anyone think the minefeild seemed a little out of place?
...TROLL moderates YOU!
Don't forget the exhibition Earth from above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand! Yes, I admit it's in another league - the photos in EFA are taken from planes, but there are some really nice gems in there.
I do hope they expand their collection a bit in the future though, as though the ones they have are amazing, I would really like to see some more, especially in the area of Europe, which seems to be somewhat lacking.
LOL, on the continent selection page, Greenland is part of EUROPE !!!!!
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
C'mon people, it's late, don't you people sleep or something?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Before you link up and fire your quad laser at me, do I get to blast you with bolts from my eyes? Seriously though, the moon would be a great place to take a few snapshots from. What kind of tourist traps do you Mooninites have?
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
Looks more like Jubba the Hut's asshole
Landsat-7 covers the entire surface of the earth every 16 days.
Frick man, that's a LOT of surface to cover.
Frankly, I'm too amazed by this to come up with a whity remark to make this post any more interesting...
...don't panic. It's art!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
It's not late until you can see the sun in the east. And before someone asks, the old computer in your garage doesnt count.
You have reached this page because your web browser is not equipped to view the Earth from Above website.
To enjoy the 'Earth from Above on the web' you will need to download the latest versions of:
Netscape 4+ or Internet Explorer 4+
(NOTE: Netscape 6 is not supported)
IE 4??? Netscape 6 isn't supported?
I would bet a few dollars that a current mozilla release (or opera, konqueror, galeon, pheonix, etc. etc.) just might be a little bit more functional than IE 4.
Nice pictures, although the colours appear to be a bit artificial in some of them, in particular the green in the Brazilian shot. It would have been nice to see an un-enhanced photo for comparison.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Like the Earth would just happen to be that nice looking from space. This just goes to prove that we didn't land on the moon because we didn't even make it into space because if we did we would have ordinary ugly pictures of the earth rather than these that were obviously done by an artist. Now excuse me but my tinfoil hat is starting to get smelly and it's tiem to change it. Now don't think I'm paranoid or anything but I don't think the government is spying on me with satellites I mean they didn't even make it into space! I need it to protect me from cancer due to the radiowaves randomly bouncing off clouds the government filled with metals and chemicals to control the weather and bounce off signals to simulate satellites (they can't launch anything into space of course). Well goodbye I hope the intelligent immortal mainframes at the FBI logging my keystrokes don't decide this is unamerican or anything and steal my heart to put into Dick Cheyney!
I stole this Sig
I don't like to be a conspiracy theorist, but the moral community holds that the Earth is a fixed point in space, and much of the secular astronomical community holds that there is no "special" reference frame and that the Earth rotates the Sun. Personally, I would hate for the USGS and NASA to be attacking the Lord. I am not convinced that these pictures are real.
you can get something like this in print for free
The Lena Delta, Russia:/ images/le na _hires.jpg
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart
As for the red stuff, I think I came across one photo with red that indicated vegetation of sort. But I doubt that colors always mean the same thing.
The article makes note that some colors [are] "assigned arbitrarily to represent data -- such as levels of heat -- not visible to the human eye."
Earth From The Air
It is the same photograhper but the exhibition is on in London. I highly recommend it. The photos are absolutly mind blowing. The prints are about 12ft x 6ft.
[Please type your sig here.]
There is an aesthetically very pleasing series of photographs done by photographer Arthus-Bertrand on behalf of UNESCO.
However, the purpose of this series is also to show man-nature interaction. Both the book and the exhibitions in various cities all over the world were a great success.
There are pictures on the web, but on the web they are not as nice as the printouts.
picture index
Those are high-heal dominatrist boots on a cross-dresser. I posted a comic strip about 10 negative posts below this one. 8D
>>showing the beauty of Earth as seen from really far away.
or in other words
Good from far, but far from good?
God is an artist... or maybe I should say science is artistic. Yah, I think I believe more in that, especiall when science is let acting on its own accord (which would be nature).
Coming back to the pics themselves, I couldn't find pics of the "Rama bridge", the one which as been in the news recently. It's a mythological bridge supposedly constructed by Rama and his devotees from India to SriLanka. They found evidence of this bridge thanks to... you guessed it... satellite imagery.
There were some striking colors, I wonder it that's the natural actual color, or if its the atmosphere playing optical tricks.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
Gee, I wonder what you were doing back there...taking his temperature perhaps with your portable pocket thermometer?
Well forget about a manned missioned to mars, NASA just spent the last of it's budget on bandwidth.
/Laugh it's funny
Thank you slashdot!
For those of you who enjoy nature..... and nature pics just go to google and then advanced image search and then wallpaper sized. Put in things like landscape... trees... starts.. hubble and you will see wonders.
The first time I saw hubble telescope pics i was dumbstruck that things so beautiful could exist.... now I realize they exist on our own earth. yes my friends there is more to life than slashdotMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
(sorry, no clue on how to reply privately to rock_climbing_guy)
Mind explaining why it isn't right ? Apart the fact that maybe it isn't the transliteration you're used to...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
the most amazing thing is not how beautiful it is, nor it feeds the intelligence creatures, but how these intelligence creatures take all of these for granted and ruin it, each and every day.
sorry, a little bit offtopic.
Earth's stark contrast of water, ice, cloud and land cannot be beat. The other planets are very beautiful, but nothing comes close to Earth.
Sex - Find It
Actually most satellite pictures don't show colors as we see it. The scanner used aboard records information in different wave length, e.g. a channel for "red", one for "blue", one for "yellow" and several for different parts of the infrared spectrum. The channels are then put together and color encoded by the scientist according to the task he wants to perform.
If you would need information about vegetation (see the optimist picture) you would use the three visible channels and add two or more infrared channels which are traditionally represented by red and blue. The final picture will show the active vegetation (high biomass production) in bright red and allows a easy interpretation.
Abstract:
Color in Landsat pictures != Color as you see it
That's your Norwegian Blue, see, he's pining for the fjords.
Fifty posts old, and nobody else misquoted the obvious Python reference. And you call yourselves nerds...
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
Check out the Blue Marble pictures. A resolution of 1 pixel/per kilometers for the whole of the planet, which makes the full pictures 40000*20000 pixels big =) They are available in different views (cloudless, with or without the sea floor relief, at night...) and are truly amazing.
I'm probably going to get a -1 for promoting my own soft, but if your computer cannot handle a 2 gb file in RAM, check my website. I made a soft (approved by the guy who made the picts) for viewing them without much RAM. Only works on macs and PCs, though I'm thinking of a linux version.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
Somebody always gets their finger in the way!i rlpool .html
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/wh
This contains load of images taken by the space shuttle. Well worth a look... Earth From Space
The bavarian TV station BR is broadcasting a similiar programme on a nightly basis. They call ist "Space-Night". Hours of beautiful earth views with a funky soundtrack. Since they are doing this, I always go to bed with the TV running. You can order the DVDs at the online shop. German only. You'll have to ask the fish.
20 minutes into the future
I don't see the fnords.
Oh, FJORDS. oh, yeah, I see those, those are coo.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Those pictures are out of this world
A short time ago the chief chicken-littles of the International Association of Environmental Alarmists and Extreamists (IAEAE) were collectively diving under their beds over a study showing how nearly every sq. inch of the planet has been hideously despoiled by nasty ol' humanity. Well, now comes a counter-study (partly funded by Gordon Moore) which claims "46 percent of Earth is still wilderness" - a salve sure to sooth the conscience of dollar sign-blinking land developers and construction workers everywhere.
Thus proving that, like statistics, politicians can pick a study to prove any damn thing they want. Meanwhile the truth continues to elude the media manipulated public.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
from the page: Namib-Naukluft National Park is an ecological preserve in Namibia's vast Namib Desert. Coastal winds create the tallest sand dunes in the world here, with some dunes reaching 980 feet (300 meters) in height.
::spits out milk:: *pfff!!* 980 feet??
I like the poster sizes just as much as the next guy, but think about why we're getting it (hint: try out irs.gov). "Most other places" wouldn't post the full version free because they'd lose money.
On this page:m ages/fj ords_hires.jpg
:-)
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/i
Look at the peninsula just left of middle at top. It looks as if the mountain has a hole blown in it. Maybe another dinosaur killer? Or ex-volcano? Or, perhaps - Entrance to the underground UFO base?
Fantastic photos. What a beautiful planet we live on. It would be great to see some shots of densely "humanised" places though, just to see how massively we have impacted the environment. Human structures all look grey from the sky. I guess it's the concrete.
/ ga rden_hires.jpg
N /158008233 5/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/202-6015171-4396631/ /www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/158017027 7/qid=1039094477/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_0_1/202-6015171-4 3966310 75130426 3/ref=br_lf_b_h__0/202-6015171-4396631
One thing that did stand out was the following:
http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images
Someone should let these farmers know that if they offset their irrigation circles just a little they'd be able to increase their land coverage. The picture clearly shows how wasteful commercial growing practises are. At times I suspect that commercial agri-techniques are geared to being as wasteful as possible. It's a seldom reported fact that organic, bio-intensive techniques can support an average human on about 200 square feet of land whereas commercial growers require several thousand times that much and they profoundly damage the environment with the introduction of harmfull pesticides and by denuding the local flora and fauna. I hate the way farmers maximise yields by torturing the Earth on government subsidies and then destroy the short term glut of produce to inflate market prices. It smells like a very dangerous short- termist conspiracy to sell more agri products to farmers (fertiliser, equipment and now GM).
How to stop the madness? Well, if you've got the time, organi-grow your own. Learn how to make fertilizer and become more self sufficient.
I'm a Systems Developer (so I know how much time work swallows up!) but I set aside a couple of hours at the weekend to cultivate a 200 sq ft patch of land in South London (UK). We have been very successful and have been richly rewared by a *surplus* of produce each year, to the extent that we give away about a third of it to neighbors and friends. We gather kitchen waste and go to the local organic markets to get the spoiling stuff to make our compost. It's very 'spiritually' rewarding and we eat fresh produce that hasn't been chilled, stored in warehouses for months on end or waxed to death and the local animals (butterflies, beetles, toads etc) aren't harmed by us "doing our human thing". But as importantly, we feel that we're just a bit more in control of our lives.
Here's a few books that we have found usefull.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASI
http:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/
Unshackle yourself a little, feel the sun on your back and eat wholesome food...
I work here and we are happy you guys enjoy.
They're crop circles!
You mean that the goverment can see us from above?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
It's a shame that you have to get so far away to appreciate the beauty, what with all the intolerance, hatred and war getting in the way up close.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
::spits out milk:: *pfff!!* 980 feet??
:-)
Yep. Hope your dune buggy has a roll bar.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
slashdot is regularly getting trafic from google. Being both a reader of slashdot and news.google.com, i found it funny that when i was perusing the science news on google the top level link for the "earth as art" story went to slashdot.org.
If anyone is interested in Mac OS X screen savers, I just made a few of all 44 pictures. I am in the process of uploading it to here:
http://144.92.10.251/download/SlideSaver/
They produced a similar series when I worked there in the early 90s. I don't know if it was in an exhibit at the LOC, but they did produce a booklet that could be purchased. They are a very dedicated, hard working group of professionals.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Images taken by a real person capture art so much better than ones taken by chance.
Check out:
www.spacestory.com
You will find a gallery of images taken by Story Musgrave, the astronaut that fixed the Hubble space telescope. He has images taken through the windows of the shuttle looking down at places all over the world.
I've been to one of his slide shows and he explains that he would float there with is camera in hand and wait for something beautiful to float through the viewfinder, then he'd track it by hand and snap the picture. Some amazing images are there. I especially like the Aurora section.
Check it out!
Interesting.. Actually, recently I was watching the television and I saw some man who took pictures of his wife while she was pregnant. Not just her wife.. but her baby as well and says his pictures are art. His 'art' shows various pictures of the baby and when he was basicly mush to when he looked like a human. The pictures also show rejected sperm attempting to get into the sperm.
Efce Tweleve (fc12)
If you're a US citizen. Landsat 7 cost
1 Billion dollars.
ouch.
If earth wasn't artistic, Slartibartfast wouldn't have earned all those awards for his norvegian fjords and coastline!!!
Red, green, blue , near infrared 1, near infrared2, far infrared , and heat bands. You can view the bands in monochrome or combine any three bands into RGB.
I thought it said FNORD, and thought that my enlightenment was near. Damn. At least the Fjords are pretty.
Pictures of earth has always been a mainstay of art. They were just done a from a closer vantage point and were called "landscape paintings".
wait until the Mars Exploration Rovers arrive at Mars a year from now. The website for Mars Pathfinder was insanely popular. NASA is already preparing for the onslaught of people who will follow the lives of the rovers on their site.
I go to this site, and I get some dumb web portal, with a link on it that says "If this is wrong site, click here".
Then it says "The reason you run into a wrong site is your name server sometimes make wrong and provide wrong ip address to you."
So.. not that I have any idea why my nameservers would be resolving nasa's domains to some guy's dumb portal.....
anyone else get this?
Yeah okay, so after reading a bit, it's some new DNS pollution exploit.
Ironically, this was submitted (and rejected) earlier today; faulting myself for not having checked for this thread before submitting (or acting before.)
The "Earth As Art" images are also available for Mac OS X v10.2 users as a .Mac (dot-mac) module for Screen Effects. Type in "EarthAsArt" as the .Mac Membership Name in the preferences to get the show going.
The images were mangled with .Mac Slides Publisher and the resulting slide show tweaked to include PDF intertitles.
The imagery is a pick of about ten random images from the about fourty images available, randomized daily by a Perl script and pushed to the site with HTTP::DAV.
Prior art disclaimer:
The "EarthAsArt" .Mac account is a trial account expiring 1/15/2003, and in no way affiliated with the oganizations the imagery originates from.
Enjoy.
This is a similar site that is more art related. It was a public art fest held in chicago. http://www.earthfromabovechicago.org/
Wrong, it was only the U.S. citizens who got to decide that the $1B was spent on Landsat, but all tax-paying U.S. residents (including non-citizens) coughed up the dough. Non-citizens just don't have any representation regarding how their tax dollars are spent.
I love the way New Zealand is now part of australia, also a pity there's no pics of NZ, there's some great scenery there, and an overview of middleeart would have been great.
Click on the large image for some really good stuff.
Being "pretty" doesn't qualify something as being "art." In fact, some really fantastic art is quite ugly and disturbing (Munch, Giger, de Goya, etc.) Art involves a relationship between artist and viewer. Art is human expression, human communication. These pictures may be aesthetically pleasing. They may even resemble some imagery used by artists. But without human expression, it's just data.
Heather Firth's site has a look at Earth's seedier side.