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.
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
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
mirror here.
If you can, mirror it somewhere else, too.
oooh this makes me very angry!
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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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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.
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'
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
It can be found here
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'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.
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"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.
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"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?
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.
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?
The server is /.'ed, here is the ASCII-image of earth from Mars:
.
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.
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.