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.
That picture has been Photoshop'd. We never landed on the moon. Consume. Marry and reproduce.
Trolling is a art,
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.
Kinda fuzzy, but that's ok. Makes us almost look lost in the nothingness. Staggering that they could even get that pic.
Well since it's slashdotted let me describe it for everyone. it looks like the picture they took from the moon only
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... =)
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
Not quite. His mamma's shadow is the black thing behind the earth and Jupiter.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
oooh this makes me very angry!
An online Starcraft RPG? Free, only at
In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
Karma: redundant
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Why does it look so big!? You kidding? Uh, probably because Jupiter is 11.2 times larger than Earth, and has a mass 318 times that of Earth... Any maybe due to the fact that Jupiter is more massive than all the other known planets in our solar system combined?
From National Geographic:
Pics.
This is only the main page, all links point to NASA.
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 was processed into the picture BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST! We never landed on the moon -- THE MOON IS A HOAX!
okay, I'm done. ^_^
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
"in the flesh"
Typical Slashdot. We get an amazing photo and already we are looking for the pr0n angle
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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?
Hehe,
/.
;-p
thanks, thanks, thanks.
I was actually wondering, and couldn't be bothered to do the calculation myself.
It's nice to see something that's not a wild uninformed guess every now and then on
Keep it up, and, guys, *mod parent up.*
from a thankful astrophysicist.
yours ever, fz.
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.
Or am I missing something?
3rd grade science, apparently.
I'll give you a hint:
My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas
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?
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
The server is /.'ed, here is the ASCII-image of earth from Mars:
.
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
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...
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.
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
"... 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
Holy Percival Lowell, Batman!
I *swear to God*, there's *canals* on Earth!
-- Terry
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!