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NASA Releases New High-Definition Image of Earth

Posted by timothy on from the texas-centric-view dept.

New submitter klchoward writes "Working for NOAA, I have been really pleased to see the weather data from the new Suomi NPP satellite coming into our computer models already but have been blown away by its capability to take stunning high-definition images of our planet. See the article at Huffington Post or go straight to the image at NASA's website." Reader derekmead has some images from further afield, too: these beautiful images of Mars come from NASA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Link to original size pic. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/618486main_earth_full.jpg

    1. Re:Link to original size pic. by idontgno · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm not sure I'm following where you're leading. This is a composite; it's a composite of Earth-view swaths of a sun-synchronous polar orbiting earth observation satellite. The "native geolocation space" of the images is a swath approximately 3000 km wide and tracking under the orbital path of the spacecraft (i.e., ground-track Mercator). This image is based on reprojecting those swaths to the geoid, so it looks like you're floating above the Equator and looking down at Earth.

      As to anti-aliasing, I dunno. This isn't a standard product of Suomi's ground system, so whatever aesthetic and technical decisions are reflected in this image are entirely on the NASA folks who did this.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  2. It's not a photograph by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's pretty, but it's not a photograph of the earth. It's CG; a rendering of a sphere texturemapped with images of the surface of the planet that they captured. Neither NASA nor huffpost are misrepresenting what it is, but there's something special about the original blue marble, which is an actual *photograph* of the entire planet, not something thrown together in 3ds max.