Slashdot Mirror
Pictures of Earth From Mars
11223 writes "Mars Global Surveyor has snapped a picture of Earth from its Mars orbit. This picture, the first of its kind, shows Earth, the Moon, and Jupiter. Earth is visible as a half disc exposing North and South America; apparently the Moon had to be "processed" into the picture."
I can see my house from here!
-kidlinux.
Or rather, it would be, if it weren't already slashdotted. :(
I hope one day to see that picture "in the flesh".
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
That picture has been Photoshop'd. We never landed on the moon. Consume. Marry and reproduce.
Trolling is a art,
That's me mooning Mars, and a couple of neighbors, there on the west coast of Florida. Smile!
This reminds me of that Martian dude from Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show...
Please direct all bug reports to
As if the people who claim the NASA missions to the moon are hoaxes didn't have enough ammuntion already...
Done, fin, kaput. Man, there has got to be some system in place to temporarily mirror sites before posting on Slashdot, yes?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
But humor & politics aside, this is a great picture. You would think that just for this picture a considerable fraction of the mission's budget would have been justified.
Not a single comment and slashdotted....
Kinda fuzzy, but that's ok. Makes us almost look lost in the nothingness. Staggering that they could even get that pic.
The damn site is already slashdotted.
Software Wars
Mirror available here. Please do not mod this up, and go gently, also once you've seen it please mirror somewhere else, this is only a T1 for gods sake! =)
Do you Gentoo!?
I was looking at those images and for some reason they just didn't look right to me. If you browse down the page a bit, you'll see that not only was the moon "processed" into the image. Essentially the entire "earth" and Jupiter images were "processed" as well.
Why does Jupiter look so big in that picture? Did anyone catch what magnification that picture was taken at? Jupiter was behind the earth, and a long ways away, why does it still look so big?
Looks like the server puked under the load, hopefully they'll come back up soon.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Well since it's slashdotted let me describe it for everyone. it looks like the picture they took from the moon only
"Hey. Check out that funky moon!"
With apologies to "Amazon Women on the Moon"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Europeons can launch their own damn surveyor!
I like how they explained how they combined and colorized the pictures. I can't help but think, however, that the temptation to "improve" it a bit more with giant Earthbound meteors would be nigh overwhelming... =)
that it shows South and North America. Could it be accident? What would it have taken to get Europe or Asia in the picture? NASA headquartes in the Eastern block? :D
;)
Nice one in any case. And I do not have a hobby flamebaiting or snitching trolls. Trolls are in my mind at least, a thing for tabletop games
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
Whoa, I was gonna try and mirror these images ... but to no avail! The webserver stopped dead during the subscriber preview time. Oh well, here's a BitTorrent link for everything I was able to get before the site went down:
BitTorrent images mirror link
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Or maybe this is "another mirror" by the time I finish posting this. The site is getting pounded hard. This is just the JPEG that was linked to, not the entire site.
/. doesn't have any consideration for other sites when they post links.
429319 byte JPEG. It's on a beefy connection, have a blast.
It's really too bad
I mean there was no need to manipulate the image to that sort of extreme.
So the moon is indeed a projection from the ground, and we blew it up during a botched nuke test?
HA! I thought so!
stuff |
mirror here.
If you can, mirror it somewhere else, too.
to all they stars. were they removed from the photo ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
From National Geographic:
Pics.
This is only the main page, all links point to NASA.
Well, the server is handling it, but the T1 is showing signs of strain.
My log file is moving so fast it's just a blur on a tail -f =)
Do you Gentoo!?
Please do not mod this up
Did people just outright ignore this request, or what?
"Sufferin' succotash."
The JPEG image is ~415kb, and the site (and mirrors) are getting hit pretty hard already.
Since the image is like 99.99999% pure black, wouldn't it have made more sense to use GIF or something? When i saved the image as a GIF it took up 8kb.
Yeah yeah, I know... gif is copyrighted, but you get my point.
no comment
All these worlds are yours to explore except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Like this one? Give it a break already, it launches in just ten days...
Yeah, I'm mirroring from you as fast as I can (2.5K or so). I think that's you, not me, as my downstream is a lot faster than my up. Fun fun fun, though; I never get this many hits on this box.
Pretty kewl to enter the date/time May 8, 9:00Est, navigate to mars and see the rendered view for yourself. Celstia lets you do this, it's a free solar system simulator. Really high-quality too IMHO. It gets the image pretty close. Make Jupiters moons a little brighter, and the earth is too clear, but it's still an educational exersize... but then again what isn't.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I see planets but no stars? Am i missing something!?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
that explains the lag, i guess ;)
It's a space station!
*rimshot*
I'd say over 5000 years old! This picture was one of the last ones taken by our ancestors before they boarded the last ships off of Mars towards Earth. After laying waste to all of Mars' natural resources and destroying the atmosphere, they needed a new place to call home. With the buildings and cars turning into fine iron dust under the heavy beating of the UV rays of the sun, they took one last snapshot and headed for Earth. Of course, there was a problem on the ride here and the computer lost all of its memory with only the hairdressers and accountants surviving the trip...
I think you know how the rest went.
It's good to see the picture's survived this long...it bodes well for Kodak and Fuji in our future.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
So I wonder what my horoscope would be if I lived on Mars?
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
"On a five year mission thru the dangerous Omicron nebula to figure out who the f8cking hell slashdotted Earth!"
Table-ized A.I.
The earth will be gone in just a few minutes. It obstructs my view of venus.
Now, where the $@#& is the Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Try again... just restarted apache, and the load seems to be letting down a bit.
Do you Gentoo!?
If you examine the image very closely, you can see their server. The explosion is visible from space.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
If you go to the space.com website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.
We all know Jupiter is big but this rare chance to phyicially see it compared to our own planet is kinda profound...
or maybe I just need to get out more.
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
"apparently the Moon had to be "processed" into the pic"
..considering they have experience processing the moon into pics ever since they did it with Neil Armstrong back in 1969.
I suspect it must be done pretty well
Even in space, starlight is very faint - when you expose for planets (which are just reflecting the sun's light) the star's light is just way to faint to register. If they had exposed to show the stars, both planets would just be super big blobs many many many times overexposed.
It's a total bomb...
Prove me wrong!
I'd love to see a high-res version of this... Like from a Hubble-sized telescope around Mars...
Yeah, I know it wouldn't really look like anything we haven't seen before, but to know that this pic was taken from the orbit of another planet...
/sig
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/22may_alie nearth.htm?list522264
Or at least i can still see it.
YEp, whorin for karma.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The earth? Oh, the earth will be gone in just a few seconds
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
NASA's spending millions of dollars to put these things in space, so why don't they host it on a server (which they definitely could afford) that won't get slashdotted?
FOCUS!!!
Is there some reason why this image, which is mostly black with just a few colored fingernail-sized areas, needs to be a 419K JPEG? When I converted it to a 69K PNG, I couldn't even tell the two images apart.
I'm glad I saw this earlier because it seems that their site is buckling under the increased hits.
I don't see what the big deal is! I take a photo of the earth from every planet in the solar system that I visit.
Geez....so passe!
Evil Man
Click Here
Aaron Z
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote
NASA has been doing cool pictures from far away for a while. Two that are worth looking at:
:) This is a Voyager 1 picture taken in 1980, I think.
Solar System Family Portrait
This one is nice, but earth is really only about 4 pixels, so you can't see all that much detail.
Saturn in shadow
This is a nice shot of Saturn by the Galileo probe, taken with about half the planet in shadown. Read the write-up there, it's kind of cool.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Here's another Mirror. Do not mod this up if the other mirrors are holding up fine.
Still under the delusion that someone, somewhere, cares what you think.
Where's my car?
The dogcow says "Moof!"
Pics are here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0
Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=6
Here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=1158
Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/03
Here:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/05/22/earth.ma
And Here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/World/view
Here is a pic of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1991 from more than 4 billion miles away (showing only a dot):
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/t
Posting as AC, I don't seek any karma. Mod up if you want to
But surely, they did wait until North America was in full view for the image? If not, who would recognize the Earth, after all?
Did you know that whenever Earth appears in "2001: A Space Odessey" North America is always pointed toward us--even if this means that it's high noon at the north pole? I guess Kubrick didn't want his audience getting confused.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Not.. The images could have been just as easily made completely in photoshop, or redshift or similiar.
Pretty pictures are the only 'value' to the space program these days, who amongst us know whether they are 'real' or just mockups anyhow.
What a load of shit this is, the only thing we will be doing in space anytime soon is filling it with satellites for spying, or entertainment, still nice to see your tax dollars at work making pointless pretty pictures.
That picture is pretty breathtaking... do you think life ever existed on Mars?
The server is /.'ed, here is the ASCII-image of earth from Mars:
.
Guess all those "we didn't land on the moon" folks will say that the full image with Jupiter will say it's a fake, too. Why is it that one planet is half-full while the other is full? Space.com says since Jupiter is beyond the sun. The orbital diagram helped, too.
If only I could see this with a backyard telescope.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
This mirror SUCKS,
All the links to the large versions of the pictures lead to DEAD links and if that wasn't enough its full of pop-up banners. WTF???
This mirror Stinks and I don't Like it.
The essence of moderators. They don't read what they mod, and if they do, they don't understand it, and if they understand it, they ignore it. Moderator, you are truly a remarkable person! I salute you!
I read someplace that the earth - on scale is more perfectly smooth than a machined steel ball bearing. If you were to scale the nicest ball bearing you could find to the size of the earth it would have pits and ridges, mountains and valleys far larger than anything on earth.
Earth looks pretty smooth from these distances
They take one of the coolest pics ever, and they do it with a grayscale camera...
*rolls eyes*
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
What's that big slice running through Florida?
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
No matter what, he belongs on /.
That site seems to be totally slashdottet, so I made a mirror: http://www.nwps.ws/mars_images/
Only after they air a TV show that calls it fake.
Thanks, I appreciate deeply those who mirror and make the world better :)
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Earth as seen from mars: a slashdot poster immediately thinks of Marvin the Martian while National Geographic thinks of The War of the Worlds.
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
awesome! We slashdotted mars
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
THAT would be a beautiful picture!
This photo doesn't impress me. Take a look at this shot of M31, our closest neighbor galaxy at 2 Million light years away. Andromeda is made up of around 10^11 stars. Now that's impressive. The solar system is so darn small-scale.
Where's the disclaimer for "this film has been modified from its original format; the film has been modified to fit your CRT screen." I smells me a Ted Turner behind this conspiracy!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
You will not get laid today.
Well said. Thanks, all...
These graphics are terrible... I mean how the hell do they expect us to get into the "realism" of whatever this game they are reviewing is, if the graphics suck so bad. Why don't they get a real picture to use...
If this is the best they can do, I am going back to my mud... nice ASCII art on there!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This seems to be a fast mirror: http://nwps.ws/mars_images/
That puts some parts of north america at the equator, which is impossible, as no parts of NA are one the equator. If you use a program like Celestia, you can actually mimic what the MGS saw (except that it's a clearer image of course), and their assignment is correct. The center of the image is northern south america. Way up high, almost going onto the oher side of the Earth is NA itself
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
They probably took the picture between DSN tracking passes. There are three DSN stations: Goldstone, California, Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia. In the picture it looks like the Southern hemisphere has the best view of Mars, so they were probably using Canberra for their downlink... so they took the picture when Canberra was out of view.
So rather than try and take a picture of south America, they were probably just avoiding taking a picture of Australia
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Grayscale cameras get better resolution than color cameras. You get to use all the photosensors for light levels, instead of having 3 for each pixel, as you do in color cameras. RGB, remember?
So, I decided I couldn't see details well enough, so here in our office, we opened up the pic in GIMP.. If you adjust "Brightness" and "Contrast" all the way up (127 on each), illuminated objects really stand out..
:)
I'm looking at something I don't understand though.. What we're looking at is the full shapes of the objects, plus refraction from the atmosphere, right?
The "Earth" is a vertically aligned rectangle with bright bars of red, green, blue, with splatters of yellow and aqua. There's a grey box coming off the left side.
The "moon" is a white dot with a black and white checkerboard pattern going to it's right.
Jupiter now appears as a larger white blob, with only a little bit of blue at the bottom, but instead of a diffused pattern, or even a finite box around it, there are three boxes, stretching from the top, left and a smaller from te right.
The right-most moon only has a tall rectangle with a similiar checkerboard pattern to the Earth's moon.
The far left moon has a lesser pattern than the Earth's moon, but it's still aparent.
The 2nd from the left moon has a distinctly different pattern.
What we're finding most pecular is that there are absolutely no stars aparent in this picture.
From the Earth, Mars looks like a bright star, in a field of stars.. Shouldn't a view from the same distance (Mars -> Earth = Earth -> Mars) have a similiar sky view? At least the larger stars should jump out at us in this picture. At least we should be seeing more stars by cranking the contrast all the way up... I'm not expecting like spectacular starfield views or anything, but I'd expect at least one..
This honestly looks like a serious photo-shop job. Someone took a black background, dropped on a few very small images, with Jupiter being the only one with distinct patterns.
It's seriously missing stars.. Bringing the contrast up a bit should at least show *SOMETHING* in there.. Looking at a night's sky from Earth, even with the city lights, if you can see Mars, you can see huge starfields.. I don't think I've ever seen Mars, and not seen any stars...
I wanna see a real picture..At least that'd be cool.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973)
Belloc
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Earth looks smaller in the picture, but is closer? Jupiter looks larger but is further away? Looking at the map with the orbits Earth is in between Jupiter and Mars.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
1 month after they leave earth...if we can ever get moving on the interplanetary propultion system that buzz aldren and friends have been working on, we can get to mars in 1 month and Jupitor in about 9.
:-)
hello dave....
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
why don't we send satellites with cameras like the ones on spy Satellites which can read number plates from space.What has nasa got to hide?! ;)
How about PNG? I saved it as PNG using GraphicConverter and it was 52 K. But I agree GIF gives even better results (but maybe lossy?)
simon
home page
I can clearly make out the face of Artuk, leader of our blessed Martian society, and I think the other part looks like a horsie.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Well, a slightly different version of this story was submitted on Thursday May 22, @03:56PM . Enjoy!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Is an arrow pointing to the blue dot with the label "You are here".
> But I agree GIF gives even better results (but maybe lossy?)
not lossy in resolution, lossy in colors.
Both PNG and GIF save pixel by pixel, GIF is limited to 256 colors.
Just use PNG for charts/screenshots and jpg for photos and don't think about it.
"... Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
-- Carl Sagan, excerpt from Pale Blue Dot
Take another look at the picture. It clearly shows the equator going through South America. The mouth of the Amazon River is right at the equator, and you can tell from the shape of SA where that is.
Awesome! My new wallpaper! Wait...
Holy Percival Lowell, Batman!
I *swear to God*, there's *canals* on Earth!
-- Terry
"Just use PNG for charts/screenshots and jpg for photos and don't think about it."
... in every case but this one ...
yes
home page
Here's the original.
Here's my version.
Also, somebody said something about the original grayscale GIF right from the camera being available. I couldn't find it but if anybody else has it, please post a link.
-- Jeff
I'm a minister!
18:18 23/5/2546
... probably that what the CCD-camera from the mars-orbiter saw from
... errr ... 7220sec. (i got a D- in mathe so don't reply if i calculated this wrong) ... ; )
TOPIC: time-shift
really a interessting picture. considering the light that shines from the sun on jupiter and the earth.
if the photon was emitted from the same atom in the sun, one photon would have travel to jupiter,
reflected and hit the CCD camera on der mars-orbiter, the other photon from the sun hit earth and
reflected and then hit the CCD camera on the mars-orbiter.
and then the photon that just went sun-mars-orbiter. kind of like a big laser-experiment on an solar-system-scale.
i don't quit know what this mean though
jupiter wasen't the acctual position of jupiter at all.
different time-lines, hey!
in the aligment picture on the "http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/" shows
there is a "stright" line from jupiter from to earth to mars. maybe some light emitted from jupiter is still
pinging back an forth between jupiter and earth and mars and earth.
i wonder what the aliens would say if they knew we "stole" some light with the CCD changed it it
radiowaves and send it back to earth, just to reproduce it a tousand times over, thru the internet ; )
next-time nasa should put a mirror in orbit around jupiter, earth and mars and then start lasering away.
should be interessting. messuring the gravitational-well around our sun.
to bad they didn't show the distance jupiter-sun and sun-mars.
anyway, from earth to mars it's 463 sec
from earth to jupiter it's 3146 sec.
maybe nasa would learn to play ball, meaning if the wanted to shoot a laser say from earth to mars to jupiter
back at earth, they would have to anticipate where mars and jupiter would be in 463 sec respective
3146 sec. true. like american football where the quaterback anticipates where the guy who's going to catch the ball
will be in 5 to 10 sec. it's not like the guy catching the ball is stationary.
okay the laser from earth to jupiter to mars (missing earth on it's way) back to earth would take
now THAT would be a hell of a quarterback if he could "throw" those photons ahead. lucky the planets aren't
running around on the playground
-
"hey, and stan, i would recommend you reevaluate the way you LOOK if you're going to see holly, just a thought."
.... is a bitch....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, maybe a few people who would take seriously such an arrogant suggestion should learn to *spell* "Europeans", but anyway apart from that
you'd better forfeit all the astronomical research done in Europe (say, from Galileo on), and the support given by ESA and European facilities to various NASA projects. And not just
from Europe, either, but also places like Australia.
Youre an idiot. How exactly is offering a second link a troll? REdundant, maybe.
Yeah, well, it's hard to tell what's what without the context. And no, the "Show Context" button doesn't really work. Sure, it takes you to page with tons of comments, and then it's up to you to find the one you're looking at, since the names aren't shown until you get to the full page and you have to search by keywords. GRR!
My God, it's devoid of stars!
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
This is quite a dumb idea: We have a picture of Earth taken from Mars; we also know exactly what the Earth looks like. This way, an algorithm can be designed to convert the blurry Earth picture into something better. Then, with this calibrated, apply it to the other planets and voilà! You have enhaced your telescopes resolution. (Yes, I know, this has been used before, but this time we can really test the algorithm)
Right. Um, I think we're agreeing here, are we not?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.