Pictures of Earth From Mars

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 22, 2003 @08:41AM from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

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."

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Mirror? by Ignorant+Aardvark · 2003-05-22 08:48 · Score: 5, Informative

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

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Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Re:Very nice. by polymath69 · 2003-05-22 08:49 · Score: 5, Informative

Space.com has the pictures, and is not (yet) slashdotted.

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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Mirror by realdpk · 2003-05-22 08:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

429319 byte JPEG. It's on a beefy connection, have a blast.

It's really too bad /. doesn't have any consideration for other sites when they post links.
Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur by KrispyKringle · 2003-05-22 08:52 · Score: 5, Informative

Seems like a good way to test my pII 400:
mirror here.
If you can, mirror it somewhere else, too.
Re:Images look funny by antis0c · 2003-05-22 08:56 · Score: 5, Informative

I downloaded the unprocessed images of Earth. The only difference is Earth is colorized, and the moon brightness is enhanced.

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..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Re:Very nice. by terkozer · 2003-05-22 09:03 · Score: 5, Informative

National Geographic has picked up the article as well...
It can be found here
Celestia by msheppard · 2003-05-22 09:06 · Score: 5, Informative

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@

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Krispy Cream is people
Re:Images look funny by travisbecker · 2003-05-22 09:10 · Score: 5, Informative

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