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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."
Kinda fuzzy, but that's ok. Makes us almost look lost in the nothingness. Staggering that they could even get that pic.
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
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?
This is also explained in those moon hoax debunker sites. Basic photography. If you can see stars, the planets would be overexposed. If you want to see the planets, you won't see the stars.
This is the same mistake that the Moon landing hoax theorists make. The planets are so much brighter than the stars that it's pretty near impossible to take a photo showing both clearly. Either the planets are clear and the stars are underexposed (invisibile) or the stars are clear and the planets are overexposed (featureless white).
"... 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