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Why Russian Space Images Look Different From NASA's
An anonymous reader writes "The Russians have published two amazing photos of Earth using their new Elektro-L satellite, in 30,000km high orbit around the equator. The quality is stunning, and they look quite different from NASA's Earth images. But why are they different? And are they better than NASA's?"
Is it just me or is the gizmodo link borked?
Gizmodo redirects any traffic to their localized versions. For example, I'm in Brazil and if I follow the link provided in the summary, they redirect me to http://www.gizmodo.com.br/#!5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before -- that doesn't exist and goes to the front page of the localized version.
Note that I both my OS and browser are in English. I even made sure that my "preferred language for displaying pages" are only English. I guess they do the redirection based on IP only, and find that quite rude.
In my experience with remote sensing better looking means nothing. What matters is the what kind of information we're able to extract from images. Like:
http://www.sciencephoto.com/images/download_wm_image.html/E750009-F._colour_Landsat_image_of_a_reservoir_in_Virginia-SPL.jpg?id=697500009
This a useful Landsat image (or composition, actually). It's also very ugly. But it's very useful.
We often had a guy to make a few beautiful images. Do the composition in the GIS software we used normally and our designed retouched it on Photoshop. People often went "wow" when looking at it but it was useless.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
http://uk.gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before
The one linked in TFS seemed to take me to the front page with adverts. The above link goes straight to the article.
The Russian photos are made entirely of data from red and infrared sensors. The NASA Blue Marble image is a completely, tragically fake rendering, with visible polygon vertices... but mapped with photos from beautiful RGB sensors.
The russian photos in question combine infra-red with visible wavelengths. They are not better, just different.
These clowns can't produce reliable URLs. Don't reward them with links.
The image.
NOAA (who is the one responsible for most American earth observation satellites, not NASA, although I'd hardly expect the Slashdot editors to know that subtlety) has been releasing image data from the GOES satellites to the public for a while. "GOES" stands for "Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite," so yes, they are in geostationary orbit.