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."
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!?
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
Space.com has the pictures, and is not (yet) slashdotted.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
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
mirror here.
If you can, mirror it somewhere else, too.
I downloaded the unprocessed images of Earth. The only difference is Earth is colorized, and the moon brightness is enhanced.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
It can be found here
Sadly, you're probably right. Fortunately, they explained exactly how it was "processed" and why, as well as provided links to the original, unprocessed images.
The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to get a good, unprocessed image of this type because of how much of a difference in brightness there is between the Earth and the Moon. I once read somewhere that the moon only reflects about 10% of the light that hits it. It's dark grey, essentially the color of asphalt, but it looks white in the sky because you see it against the pitch black background. The Earth, OTOH, reflects about 45% of the light that strikes it, which makes it's apparent magnitude (brightness) much higher when seen from afar. This is why they had to process it the image.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
what about PNG? it should give you an image of comperable size without people lashing about how evil Unisys is.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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
Ahh ... one who hasn't heard of the moon shot conspiracy. Basically, the stars are of much lower magnitude than the celestial bodies being imaged, and therefore they don't show up in this picture. Many have tried to claim that evidence of the vast NASA conspiracy lies in the fact that no stars are to be seen on any of the photos taken by Apollo astronauts. If you've had any exposure to physics (or if you can perform logical deduction on your own) you'd be keen to why this happens the way it does.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
Why does Jupiter look so big in that picture?
From one of the astronomy programs I have, I was able to get this data for 08-May-2003:
Earth-Mars range: 1.398e8 km
Jupiter-Mars range: 9.438e8 km
Earth radius: 6378.12 km
Jupiter radius: 71492.35 km
So using
size = atan( radius / range )
we obtain apparent sizes from Mars:
Jupiter: 0.0043 deg
Earth: 0.0026 deg
So Jupiter should be almost twice as big, even though it's almost 7 times farther away. One can probably also figure out the magnification based on the image.
Travis
Indeed. Converted with the Gimp at compression level 6, this 429,319 byte image shrinks to a mere 40,714.
Not bad, for a 24-bit non-lossy image format.
--- Chris
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.
they have NO ammunition. There 'evidence' is caused by the fact they have no understanding of basic photographic principles, and think the the moon is just like the earth.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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
if you want the full resolution tiffs (and jpgs too) look at the jpl site:
jupiter and moons
earth and moon
itty bitty earth and jupiter
This seems to be a fast mirror: http://nwps.ws/mars_images/
For those not in the know, it should've been "Consume." and "Marry and Reproduce."
They're from the John Carpenter film They Live, in which aliens are trying to take over the planet, and have bribed some human leaders into helping. The aliens masquerade as humans, and insert subliminal messages into advertisements. Roddy Piper, who plays the protagonist, finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see things as they really are. There's a scene where he walks outside and sees some billboards. Then he puts on the sunglasses, and sees what the billboards really say: one says "Consume", another says "Marry and reproduce".
One word: Celestia
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Except that GIFs can only have 8-bit indexed color, which means you've got a maximum of 256 different colors.
Both PNG and JPEG support 24-bit true color (which uses 8 bits for each channel, and is not indexed), giving a maximum of around 16.7 million colors.
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!
Someone explained this before, but if you want a picture of the planets with stars, the planets will be overexposed. If you want the planets exposed correctly the stars will be too dark to see. Besides turning up contrast and brightness isn't going to expose the image more, if I take a picture with a 1/2000 shutter speed of a dark room, no amount of brightness, contrast, changing will make it a clear picture.
Yep, bang on about most of the effects that the parent saw being compression artifacts.
Ok, now as to why there are no stars. The Earth recieves a lot more solar radiation than Mars (distance squared). Presume that the albedo (amount reflected) is the same. So you have a lot more photons going into your camera if you take a picture of the Earth from Mars than vv. This means that you can use a shorter exposure and hence less stars will appear. Then do JPEG compression and watch the few point-like stars get smoothed out. Also, we don't know what else has been done to the image. Subsample and point like stars can go.
If you want to hunt around in the depths of an image looking for cool stuff, start off with an unprocessed original.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
Staggering that they could even get that pic.
They didn't, technically. The camera on the MGS is grayscale. They used stock photos to apply color to the images. They're totally forthcoming about this and the technique if you go straight to the source.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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