Pictures of Earth From Mars

11223 writes "Mars Global Surveyor has snapped a picture of Earth from its Mars orbit. This picture, the first of its kind, shows Earth, the Moon, and Jupiter. Earth is visible as a half disc exposing North and South America; apparently the Moon had to be "processed" into the picture."

Nice pics of home

[fudgefactor7]

Kinda fuzzy, but that's ok. Makes us almost look lost in the nothingness. Staggering that they could even get that pic.

Better format?

[zapp]

The JPEG image is ~415kb, and the site (and mirrors) are getting hit pretty hard already.

Since the image is like 99.99999% pure black, wouldn't it have made more sense to use GIF or something? When i saved the image as a GIF it took up 8kb.

Yeah yeah, I know... gif is copyrighted, but you get my point.

Hmm

[Tyrdium]

NASA's spending millions of dollars to put these things in space, so why don't they host it on a server (which they definitely could afford) that won't get slashdotted?

Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not.. The images could have been just as easily made completely in photoshop, or redshift or similiar.

Pretty pictures are the only 'value' to the space program these days, who amongst us know whether they are 'real' or just mockups anyhow.

What a load of shit this is, the only thing we will be doing in space anytime soon is filling it with satellites for spying, or entertainment, still nice to see your tax dollars at work making pointless pretty pictures.

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[Anonymous Coward]

The essence of moderators. They don't read what they mod, and if they do, they don't understand it, and if they understand it, they ignore it. Moderator, you are truly a remarkable person! I salute you!

Re:Where did all the stars go?

[klui]

This is also explained in those moon hoax debunker sites. Basic photography. If you can see stars, the planets would be overexposed. If you want to see the planets, you won't see the stars.

"Processed"? WTF does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.

Re:Hmmmm, interesting

[ZigMonty]

This is the same mistake that the Moon landing hoax theorists make. The planets are so much brighter than the stars that it's pretty near impossible to take a photo showing both clearly. Either the planets are clear and the stars are underexposed (invisibile) or the stars are clear and the planets are overexposed (featureless white).

Pale Blue Dot

[Anonymous Coward]

"... 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

-- Carl Sagan, excerpt from Pale Blue Dot