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Juno Looks Back, Photographs Earth-Moon System
astroengine writes "Looking back as it zooms through interplanetary space, less than a month into its 445-million mile, five-year journey to the gas giant Jupiter, NASA's spacecraft Juno captured a portrait of the Earth and moon. Juno was 6 million miles away at the time. 'This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,' said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. 'This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.'"
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Fake! Where are those orbital lines you always see in diagrams?
We traveled that distance a few times almost 50 years ago now. Imagine if we had done it for science instead of hatred of another country.
Sad :/
Hey! I can see my house from here!
Money for nothing, pix for free
"Juno was 6 million miles away at the time"
For reference, Geostationary orbit is about 22,000 miles. What kind of photo's were you expecting to get?
Nobody can hear us scream...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJE_Ld-UyCk
Insert signature here...
it cost $700 million they could at least put a decent camera on-board the spacecra....oh wait....
What I want to know is what kind of Wi does this thing have? I can barely bring up a web page on my ipod touch 50 feet away from my house!
What kind of photo's were you expecting to get?
I don't know, one worthy of being mentioned on /. I guess. Informing us that Juno is 6 million miles away, and that it's able to send us pictures is as impressive as actually seeing this picture.
You can barely see anything in the picture!
From TFA:
"This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves."
Are they about to sell this picture to a modern art museum?
"The damage doesn't look as bad from out here..."
is dust on the lens.
The Admin and the Engineer
I know my trigonometry is a bit off these days, and we have no indication here of zoom, but from 6M miles away, I would have expected the earth and the moon to appear closer together; in fact I would have expected them to be virtually indistinguishable.
If it wasn't that the reason it is a white spot instead of a blue one that this shot is capturing the light reflecting of my white belly as I try to catch some of the dutch summer.
Some are born great, some have greatness trust upon them, I have my own moon!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.'"
Once again they want me to feel humble. Quite to the contrary, that little dot is a very small part of the universe and yet it's the only place we know for sure that life exists. That makes me feel pretty special.
The Mars Express spacecraft got a better (IMHO) shot a few years back: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/express/newsroom/pressreleases/20030717a_image01.html
Rule 34.
Fairly simple. Given the poor resolution however I suspect its cropping. I would have expected better frankly. In space 6M miles really isn't very far.
This reminds me of the photograph of Earth taken by Voyager the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph taken from the edge of the solar system. That is an amazing picture. It makes you realize just how small and fragile the Earth really is in the immensity of the Universe.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
A quote of Carl Sagan, for those who don't know.
...but couldn't they take a picture while the probe was a bit closer to us?
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
What's the matter? Did you get cut from selection because of your drug habit? Diddums. Fuck off.
Really? You think if I take your 12MP Kodak several million miles away it's going to take crystal clear pictures? Come on. It's 6 million miles for crying out loud. It's not like you're going to zoom in and see continents.
Actually, I usually do a little investigating on images on my own just for fun. I don't doubt that NASA did these things, but it is interesting that the image has a photoshop signature and a timestamp of just 3 hours prior to the article being published. So it wasn't just the raw image from NASA? I also pulled it into GIMP and was interested that the background was so uniform a color. In fact, its all exactly the same color everywhere except for the dots. Take it in yourself and adjust the brightness and contrast, then you can use the magic select with a threshold of zero. It selects everything except the dots, which tells me that the background color is completely uniform, as if created by a fill. I know photography in space is weird, but I would think with any photograph you'd have a few off color artifacts in the image.
On the other hand, there are artifacts around the dots themselves and the color of the dots isn't uniformly white. Still, somewhat suspicious.
It would have been sharper but somebody moved.
We're going to have to do this a thousand times before I'll be able to see my house!
That's no moon...
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
One of the better bits Eric Idle came up with.
I am officially gone from
If only we had the technology to do such research when they faked the moon landings .....
Have gnu, will travel.
Unfortunately he's also the Juno principal photographer.
As featured on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
By the way, how nice of them to put so many of their clips on YouTube, instead of DMCAing every fan and waiting for the royalties from the dvds...
exp(i*pi)+1=0
In true nerd fashion it is indeed my favorite song that Eric Idle ever wrote. It is amazing how he was able to capture our utter insignificance in 24 lines, all while rhyming and ending with a punchline.
Aw shit, I'm gushing aren't I?
Cool post bro, highfive \o
I look horrible in that picture! At least they could have warned me before and I could have combed my hair!
...for a non-scientist.
Where are the stars in these pictures?
Genuine question - I really don't understand.
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF248-Transmission.jpg
I guess it's not really obligatory. But here you go, anyway.
Give me a break. Obviously, they used Photoshop for two purposes: to convert/resize the image for the web, and to clean up noise artifacts. I have no idea what kind of imaging sensor is on this spacecraft, but I have no doubt its images do contain noise. That isn't real. And that, therefore, can be taken out in post-processing without altering the data of interest.
And for the people whining that they should just slap any old digital camera on there, I have two words: radiation hardening.
really puts us in perspective to the rest of the solar system. we are not special. we are just a small insignificant dot in a sea of planets and stars and galaxies.