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."

Comments

Another Pic

[BurritoWarrior]

From National Geographic:

Pics.

Makes you realize how big Jupiter is...

[mooman]

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.

Re:Makes you realize how big Jupiter is...

[djtack]

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.

This is partly due to the long focal length of the lens. It distorts perspective, the same way a photographer can make the moon apear much larger by taking the picture with a long telephoto, at a distance from the subject.

But no doubt, it was inspiring to see Earth and Jupiter in the same frame together.

Re:Better format?

[robsimmon]

Actually, the raw (black and white, not contrast adjusted) image is saved as a GIF - and it's still pretty big 'cause there's some invisible noise in the black.

In any case, JPEG does LZW (or similar) compression as a final step, so a JPEG would also have been very small if the noise was removed.

Not the first far-earth pictures

[TFloore]

NASA has been doing cool pictures from far away for a while. Two that are worth looking at:

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. :) This is a Voyager 1 picture taken in 1980, I think.

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.

Hmmmm, interesting

[JWSmythe]

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. :)