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An Epic View of the Moon In Earth's Orbital Embrace
astroengine writes: As a suitably impressive follow-up to the new "blue marble" image of our world released in July, NASA shared a gorgeous animation created from pictures captured by NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles (1.5 million km) away — over four times farther than the moon. In a series of images acquired between 3:50 and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, 2015, the moon can be seen passing in front of a rotating Earth, the warm gray face of its far side framed by the swirling-cloud-covered blue water of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The north pole is at the 11 o'clock position, illustrating our planet's 23.5-degree axial tilt.
Truly beautiful.
That is all.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They made up all that math. The Earth is flat, see "Zetetic Astronomy": http://www.sacred-texts.com/ea...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
... "It's a binary planet."
Seriously the Moon is crazy large relative to the Earth. The Earth-Moon doesn't currently meet the most commonly accepted definition of "binary planet", although it will in a hundred million years or so. On the other hand Isaac Asimov proposed a very reasonable definition of "binary planet" which the Earth/Moon system meets; you can read about it in the link above. I think it figured in one of the Foundation stories.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd hesitate to call that person a "researcher". Those rolling distortions he filmed are pretty easily explained as some sort of atmospheric distortion - the very simplest possible explanation. Call me when we see a video of the moon with rippling distortions while filmed from orbit.
I think the reason this particular NASA image looks "fake" is because we have no frame of reference for it. We almost never see the back side of the moon, nor are used to seeing it crossing in front of the Earth. Moreover, the way it's badly compressed into an animated gif makes it look even sketchier. Seriously, it's 2015. Do we not have anything better than gifs for animating small clips like this?
What's funny is that I tend to believe it's real almost *because* it looks sort of hokey. It would be pretty easy to make a much more convincing CG animation that would look much more "realistic".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The youtube version shows a lot more color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMdhQsHbWTs
Unfortunately, because of the way the images were taken, with separate exposures for the red green and blue colors, the moon is slightly blurred and has a color fringe around it. This is further compounded by the extremely flat light, rendering the moon in the image rather featureless.
What I found most interesting about this image is that it really shows how dark the moon is. It's something to think about when looking at the seemingly stark light of the full moon. Imagine how bright it would be if it was snow white.
“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”
The Moon has an albedo of about 0.1 (similar to coal), while Earth's albedo is three times greater, so this isn't really very surprising at all.