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From the Moon to Earth in HD
Lucas123 writes "The Japan Space Agency's Kaguya spacecraft is currently orbiting the moon and its equipment is being tested in preparation for its real mission to map the moon with high-definition images later this month. Almost as an afterthought, the space craft has recreated one of the most memorable photos
in the history of spaceflight — an Earth-rise from lunar orbit."
a high definition movie set in Japan!
To which I can only say: BULLSHIT!
"What kind of spacecraft it that?"
"Why, it's a spacecraft spacecraft!"
makes me wonder if these vids/images are going to be made avail to the public in HD
I was able to find two HD pictures:
http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/image/communication/img_071114_01.jpg
http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/image/communication/img_071114_02.jpg
1920x1080
Couldn't find anything else though. Disappointing.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
i thought it might have HD time-lapse of the earth rising... instead it just has some composite images of same at smaller resolution. I was all ready with my 2001-2010 quotes and music and everything!
stuff |
The Japan Space Agency's (JAXA's) Kaguya spacecraft re-created one of the most memorable photos from space--an Earth-rise from runar orbit. But this one was taken for the first time with a high-definition camera.
JAXA's spacecraft is currentry orbiting the moon and its equipment is being tested in preparation for its real mission to map the moon with high-definition images rater this month. Two saterrites carried by Kaguya, including one that will eventuarry rand on the moon, have already been raunched into runar orbit to help the runar mapping project.
NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, deveroped HDTV for use in space. Crick here to see a video of the Earth-rise and Earth-set from the JAXA project site.
For comparison, the original.
http://dayton.hq.nasa.gov/IMAGES/LARGE/GPN-2001-000009.jpg
The older image appears to be higher resolution.
liqbase
I'm curious if they'll be able to see the Apollo landing sites. Have we had a look at them since we left? That would be the first place I'd visit if I landed on the moon - there ought to be some interesting data available from the materials left out in baking space for 30-odd years.
12:50 - press return.
Well, one of the tags is !hd. But that's a stretch.
I didn't read the article - I've heard a few stories about things recently being filmed in HD. Why I am unclear about is, haven't we had HD capturing technology for a long time (if you had the money?) For instance, I'm certain that a lot of imaging arrays that NASA use are already HD, when I mean 'already' - I mean well before the average joe goes to circuit city and buys an LCD HD display. What am I missing here? Shouldn't we have already tonnes of HD footage?
That older one looks like it was scanned in from a negative or a blown up film print. I don't know how you might accurately examine the real resolution comparitively.
Gravity Sucks
To make it worse, they're blurry as hell. Like they took the blurry thumbnails, magnified them 4x in photoshop, and applied a few blur filters for good measure. WTF?
These are obvious fakes! Everyone knows the moon doesn't exist and was just made as a fake destination so America could fake a landing on its surface to beat the Soviets!
Top that crazy conspiracy theory!
There's an interesting phenomenon that most people don't consider. Since the moon rotates about its axis at the same period as its orbit, the earth always appears at the same place in the sky when viewed from a given location on the surface of the moon (unless of course you were on the "dark" side of the moon).
That would be incredibly useful for navigation!
The article seemed to misstate this fact:
Since the moon's rotation matches the Earth's rotation of the sun, the Earth will always appear to be in the same spot if seen by an astronaut standing on the moon.
Doesn't that infer the moon's rotation is 365.25 days?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPB3H_a234s
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
The NASA one has stars. ;)
Its obviously better
liqbase
Huh? the second image is definitely HD but it's a still from a motion set so not extremely clear but you can make out continents and stuff which ain't bad from lunar orbit =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The original photo was more than likely FILM, not digital. They had to wait for the astronauts to come home before developing it. From the probe they're doing "HD" resolution and the image is NOW baby! :)
I kind of like NOW over "film at 11"... but that's just me.
IMAX, could be scanned at 10000 x 7000 pixels, which definitely qualifies as HD.
And we already have quite a bit of IMAX footage.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Will Sony pull a similar stunt to stay competitive?
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
yet more proof that liberals hate america, god, jesus, and our beloved christian faith.
we might as well all go have sex with ferrets if this is the sort of thing that is allowed on the new 'HD' television.
Thats about as HD as my old digital cam. I guess they lower their standards for spacecraft.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I'm still looking for the huge versions of these pictures. The best I've found are two 1920x1080 images on the agency website. While these are HD, I need something I can fit nicely on to my desktop (3840x1200). Some of the stills coming from the ISS are great for this.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
... from 1968 (Apollo 8)!
... from 1976 (Viking)!
... from 1979 (Voyager)!
http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/photos/b/as08-14-2383.jpg
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/mars_surface_vik2_big.jpg
http://oursun.open.ac.uk/images/jupiterp_cassini_full.jpg
What makes this new "first HD camera in space" so special (yes, I know the Apollo images are shot on film, but Viking and Voyager had video cameras)?
On the moon missions the astronauts used medium format Hasselblad cameras. Medium format has a significantly larger negative area. The most common aspect ratios are 6×6 cm (square) and 6×4.5 cm (rectangular). For comparison the phase one digital backs which often take the place of film in these cameras nowadays get up to about 40 megapixels. Much more then HD.
Excuse me for not exactly jumping for joy over the news of shiny new HD footage from the Moon. Is this actually an improvement over previous probes? What were they using before, consumer-grade camcorders? I would have thought film, which usually still has HD beat.
Look on this page for High Res Pics
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071113_kaguya_e.html#pict01
and these movies of EarthRise and EarthSet
http://space.jaxa.jp/movie/20071113_kaguya_movie01_e.html
http://space.jaxa.jp/movie/20071113_kaguya_movie02_e.html
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Cool, thanks! I've been looking for a new desktop background.
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
it should be on in about half an hour (5pm PST) on Discovery HD for 30 minutes, not sure how much of the footage they're going to show (or if it's only on the Canadian Discovery HD) but it's on my cable box's IPG so do check it out, I seem to recall also that it will be repeated at least twice in the next few days.
-- the cake is a lie
YAAY! I can see Australia
but it's upside down.... hmmm maybe Australia is on top of the world
(welcomes sarcasm)
More shots from the sequence scanned at approx 2400x2400 resolution.
Okay, call me dumbo, but why is the Earth upside down in those pictures, I mean south pole up?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Rats, I thought this was about the miniseries to HD. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
thanks for the links. that first image is like standing on the moon, hardly disappointing!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The HD camera on SELENE is a PR instrument. Video is useful for things that change. The moon, for the most part, does not change, and the HD camera does not produce scientifically useful images of the moon. SELENE can only take about a minute worth of video.
High Definition as a proper noun generally refers to 1920x1080 resolution, but the various space agencies have produced much higher resolution images for years. The 35mm film shot during the Apollo missions is being scanned into 3070x2044 pixel images, for example, and the medium format film is being scanned at a huge 12800x12800 pixels. The Mars rovers carry 1 MP (1024 x 1024) cameras, and the images are often stitched together into far larger mosaics. I've seen some that even as JPG's take up over 100 MB (and crash IE). The Hubble Space Telescope's highest resolution camera is also only 1024x1024 pixels, and I believe this was chosen to approximate the maximum resolution of the optics, but again, large mosaics are common.
The High Resolution Imaging Scientific Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter takes a different approach and is what's called a "push broom camera." Instead of taking rectangular pictures every so often, it scans a single line of up to 20,000 pixels continuously at the rate the spacecraft moves over the ground. In this way it builds up images up to 40,000 pixels long (800 megapixels...now that's high def!), at which point the file has to be transmitted to earth or the camera runs out of memory.
Yes, but those are still pics, nothing new there. This particular camera on Kaguya is 3CCD HD video, which is rather unusual to have in space.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
It's a still from a video.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I looked at the two screenshots. The spatial resolution at 1:1 isn't so hot on that camera, but hey it's orbiting the moon, so can't ask for much more right now. It will also look better in motion. Hopefully I can get the Discovery HD program somehow.
Comparing to the medium format still footage by Apollo's Bill Anders (Whom I've had the pleasure of briefly meeting when he was flying a P51 around here recently), Bill's photos are exposed more for the lunar surface than the earth. It appears that the white clouds of earth are overexposed when the moon is in correct exposure, at least in the one shot linked above. The HD camera probably has a comparable or a little less exposure leniency depending on whether the Apollo cameras used slide or negative film. (I think they were slide?)
The JAXA footage has the earth exposed nicely and the moon is out of peak range, with most features deep in a medium grey. This has an advantage of bringing out the contour features on the lunar surface better. Also, seeing the progression of sunrise really looks interesting with no atmosphere. Landing on the moon at the perpetual twilight line would give one unlimited time to walk around and frame the earth against numerous lunar features. With the enlarged size of the earth, it will take less telephoto length to capture it at a reasonable size in the frame.
--Mike
I would never understand why a government needs copyright.
You mean an obviously better fake ;)
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
nice shiny picture of the earth from the moon
exactly. the earth, and more importantly the moon, is way too "shiny" for the brightest of the stars to show up on the picture.
some of us like to do a little thing i call "thinking" we post. do you?
1920x1080 is the camera max resolution, you won't find anything better from this spacecraft. Info extracted from the bottom of this page: http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071113_kaguya_e.html
I assume that the concept of "the Earth rising from the Moon" is an artifact of the Satellite orbiting the Moon...
The industry standard rebuttal
Yeah. Film is much more HD than an HD video camera or HD still digital camera.
I'd love to set these images as my background, but the copywrite ruins it.
Nope. Me too. Excellent video.
on what planet is 550x309 considered "HD" ?
Yes! Notice the cloud cover over the Eastern seaboard?
Well yesterday I had to mow the lawn because of all the rain we've had...
Geez I hate grass.
I reckon the Greeks and Italians (maybe the Egyptians) worked it all out 1000's years ago and put marble or stone or lots of sand.
Don't see any pottery with Greeks mowing grass do you?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This isn't meant as a troll... The shots are indeed beautiful.
But I was a little disappointed by the categorization of "HD"
Those seemed like pretty 'standard def' to me...
Are there higher res shots somewhere else?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Here's video from that footage, it's not HD but worth seeing. http://194.252.88.5/yle24/video/14_maa_kuusta_512.wmv
Sure, HD is cool. But for science return - resolution is what matters. Anyone know what the resolution of this camera is?
i love to think about how human culture might have developed if our orbital circumstances were different.
this is a great example - if we'd developed on a planet which had a single body always hanging in the same place in the sky, such as earth viewed from the moon, and which clearly waxed and waned in synchronicity with our own month-long day and night, it would be pretty unlikely we'd think of ourselves as the center of the universe with all things orbiting us.
or if say good old earth had more than one significant sattelite, we might not be so entrenched in the moon/sun, light/dark, yin/yang duality thing we've got going on.
Since the moon rotates about its axis at the same period as its orbit, the earth always appears at the same place in the sky when viewed from a given location on the surface of the moon
If you are standing at the point where Earth is barely visible above horizon, it won't appear stationary. The reason for this is that since the orbit of the Moon is elliptical, you will see the Earth rising or setting at almost any moment.Photo #1 looks remarkably like the scene from the opening credits to Space 1999. Are we sure these are for real?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
How come that in these photos, the shadows on the moon surface are completely dark and not half-dark as in the Apollo photos?
...will be resolved by this mission.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYMzVkhkrqA
any chance of a high res photo of the appollo landing sites so we can put the kooky's to bed?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The poster writes: "Almost as an afterthought, the space craft has recreated one of the most memorable photos in the history of spaceflight -- an Earth-rise from lunar orbit."
This seems to suggest that the spacecraft makes author-like decisions. But either the camera and/or craft are remote controlled, in which case the photo is not an afterthought but a deliberate attempt to make that photo, or the camera operates completely automatic, in which case the "afterthought" comment is an anthropomorphism.
Not that the poster can be blamed much; JAXA has printed a copyright statement on the photo, which means that either they claim the photo has a (necessarily human) author, or that they are committing copyfraud.
I half expected a Gundam to fly by.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
No, wait, sorry 'bout that. Yeah, that's a moon. Carry on.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Two projects I'd like to see done.
1) IMAX camera in lunar orbit.
2) IMAX camera on lunar rover.
3) IMAX Camera in Mars orbit.
Damn, three, three projects I'd like to see done.
I'll come in again...
Actually an IMAX camera anywhere in the solar system.
Can you imagine IMAX-quality images taken from Saturn orbit?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
If only JAXA released the HD prints instead of releasing Web 2.0 thumbnails and saying it's HD.
The problem is that IMAX is a film camera, so you would have to get the film back to this planet.
Unless you want to use a very high resolution movie camera like the Red One.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I know. What we need is IMAX-digital.
And now you're talking waaay too much bandwidth.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
One would have to find out the specifications of the film and the optics used for the original shot.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
The thing that strikes me about those photos is how dull gray the moon is. And the actual moon dust samples the astronauts brought back are quite dark gray as well. Compare that with how bright white the moon looks on a clear night when it's not near the horizon. Amazing how vision fools us.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.