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?"

Comments

Please don't link to Gizmodo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bla

[vbraga]

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.

Re:borked link

[sproketboy]

Gizmodo always does that. The links all revert to their home page like the fucken inbred assholes that they are.

Remove the "#!" part.

http://gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before

1st and I hope last time on gizmodo

[leehwtsohg]

Oh, gizmodo is horrible. First it took me to the german site, which didn't have the article. Then, after lots of manipulation (click the little 'US' label on the left top), I got to the article, but couldn't figure out how to close the stupid window that covers half of the cool image they're talking about.

But, to the subject: Isn't it fairly obvious why the russian image looks better? Look: compare the NASA image: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2429 to the russian one: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/images/spacecraft/application/weather/elektro/earth_disk1_1.jpg One obvious difference - in the NASA image, clouds have no shadow, in the russian one they do. That makes the NASA image look flat, and the russian one jump out in 3D. Why that is, I'm not sure.

Re:1st and I hope last time on gizmodo

[yoshi_mon]

Yeah, that site is a mess if you are using NoScript. I normally will allow the site itself and see if that will fix it but it did not. So rather than allowing the 5+ data-mining addresses to operate I just will do without.

They are just different visualizations of reality

[screamphilling]

"the Russian images are not better or worse than their images. They are just different visualizations of reality based on different data sets" and this sums up nearly everything ever.

Re:borked link

[melikamp]

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/elektro.html

tl;dr

[Beardydog]

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.

summaries should summarize, not tease.

[doug141]

The russian photos in question combine infra-red with visible wavelengths. They are not better, just different.

Re:borked link

[Nemyst]

Thank god the old site is still there and works even better:

http://ca.gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before

(the ca. prefix is applicable to all Gawker sites, couldn't live without it)