Slashdot Mirror
A Half-Gigabyte View of the Moon
An anonymous reader writes "A new 24,000-pixel-square half-gigabyte mosaic from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Moon's nearside as never before. The 1,300 black-and-white frames were acquired during a two-week period in December 2010. There is also video of the half gig moon."
Slashdotted in 3, 2, 1....
map it. Anyone ?
Wait... it is a moon.
It can resolve the surface at 2 feet (0.5 m) per pixel — good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots.
Holy crap.
It should be high rez enough to see the leftover junk from the manned landings. If this doesn't shut the moon landing conspiracists up, nothing will.
According to the NASA article,
the WAC maps nearly the whole Moon every month, in 7 wavelengths
Why do they give us only one?
Let's wait for the superzoomers to answer that... but I would say it was really unlucky if there isn't any...
Alternative to downloading 500+ MB .tif from overwhelmed server...
Moon
...or maybe GoogleMaps craterview would be cool
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ [for March 3, 2011]
aliens ? Only 1/2 of the moon ? What's on the other half ?
shows the Moon's nearside as never before.
Anyone else misread that as rearside? Time to lay off the porn.
"good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots."
Yeah, right! It's Photoshopped.
-- Boycott Shell
One looks like a deep dry river bed around Archimedes. WTF is that? It's not shallow like the others (I guess lava flows?). Second, I see a short crater rows. I guess this is from a stream of some disintegrated meteor?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
From the article : "The combined image shows slight banding where the 1,024-pixel-wide swaths were stitched together."
BULL! those are where the moon farmers were harvesting their moon wheat! It's all a coverup!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
so here it is
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6216436
Yeah well 123,610,657.88 (21.46%) of those pixels are completely black.
Well, the slashdot effect definitely hit the .tif's site (lroc.sese.asu.edu) for a bit(got to the point where wget lost the connection, and was dial-up speeds before that), but it seems they've mostly recovered! Getting about 2Mbps on the download now.
Wait. These pictures indicate it it is. Sorry, everyone! False alarm.
I'm so embarrassed.
No sig for you!!
I wonder how they compensated the libration in the timeframe they took the images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration
And no, I didn't read TFA.
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
Turn off the sound first.
My wife got all excited by this story. She'd always told me that there were pixies on the moon.
I'm going to send an email to everyone I know in Canada
A zooming version is available at zoom.it
Man, they need some mirrors badly. Only getting 500KB/sec.. gonna take forever to download.
Off course you won't be able to see the moon landing site.
Some will tell you is because of resolution.
I say it is because New Mexico is not in the moon.
I can see my house in that picture.
Once I get my grubby paws on the entire mosaic, my copy of Rukl's lunar atlas is going up on Cloudy Nights.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
Uh, because official Arizona State University sites paid for by NASA are not prime goatse territory ?
Any super resolution image for the Earth around?
"black-and-white frames" doesn't NASA have color cameras???
If this were a JPEG it'd be around 40 MB.
And so much from NASA. Seriously, NASA releases just about everything, while CHina gives just enough to try and make themselves sound nice. Yet, it is a fraction of what they recover. WHy? Because their space program is a MILITARY system, not a civilian one. For you westerners pushing for us to work with China on space, keep in mind that you are helping on weapon systems that will be pointed at us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and i grabbed a lot a neat images form it and might even print it all off and make a floor wall ceilling of it
As the author of a number of iPad TIF readers this 549 megapixel image was yet another challenge. Fortunately we spent a few weeks in February dealing with Petroleum well logs which can be 2530x186,000 pixels, largest we worked with was about 425 megapixels, so what's another 100 megapixels?
In our stable of products "Well Logs" for the iPad/iPhone is the only app that will let you open the file as it's optimized for 500 megapixel TIFF files where as our other products only work up to 250 megapixels.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/well-logs/id419051479?mt=8
(a) the thumbnail is wrong, oh well, math for long skinny truncate is wrong for a rectangle.
(b) It takes about 3 hours to pre-render the TIFF into a meta-file. We'll have desktop support for that step in April sometime.
Still once it's done, then re-opening is lightning fast and zoom zoom zoom...
I really do think that it's amazing what the right hardware in the right place can do for increasing our knowledge. The optics on this spacecraft that generated the data, are no larger than an average webcam at ~1.2mm aperture, F/5 focal ratio described as a telescope (6mm f/5 described as a camera lens). Really impressive dataset.
I can't wait for the Virtual Moon Atlas to have this dataset available..
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
And after all these years I was convinced that the moon was made of blue cheese...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...