A Half-Gigabyte View of the Moon 112
An anonymous reader writes "A new 24,000-pixel-square half-gigabyte mosaic from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Moon's nearside as never before. The 1,300 black-and-white frames were acquired during a two-week period in December 2010. There is also video of the half gig moon."
Half GB worth of pictures? (Score:2)
Slashdotted in 3, 2, 1....
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1-pi/4 of it is black, I feel cheated!
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In that case, tif should have done a good job compressing it so most of the half gig should be on the rest.
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One of these days I'll discover your read UserID and -1 all your posts, as you do to me day-after-day-after-day.
As I have stated many, many times before, I do not actually enjoy modding you down. But you leave me no alternative. You are doing more harm than good towards our mutual views.
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Mirror here: moon [nocookie.net]
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It's Edward James Olmos's face.
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They have a good server. I just finished the download in about 15 minutes. All I can say is wow!
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Someone has a stretch of the number 1/2 gig.. Here is the size of the TIFF..
155.5 MB (163085739 bytes)
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http://www.google.com/moon/ [google.com]
That's no moon... (Score:1)
Wait... it is a moon.
Resolution (Score:1)
It can resolve the surface at 2 feet (0.5 m) per pixel — good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots.
Holy crap.
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It can resolve the surface at 2 feet (0.5 m) per pixel — good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots.
Holy crap.
I agree. Those are some HUGE boots.
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2 feet per pixel? Is that 2 left feet, 2 right feet or one of each? I guess it would depend on whether the astronauts were taking giant steps or jumping at the time.
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Giant leaps for mankind, of course
Re:Resolution (Score:5, Informative)
Not this image.
This is a mosaic from the LROC's wide angle camera. A rough, back-of-the-envelope calculate dividing the diameter of the moon by 24000 pixels suggests a spatial resolution around 140m.
The 0.5m resolution is from the main camera. A 0.5m mosaic of the entire Earth-facing side of the moon would be on the order of 7000000x7000000 not 24000x24000.
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When you say "back-of-the-envelope" you mean Windows Calculator don't you ...
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Google, actually. Try it: "diameter of the moon / 24000".
Of course, I meant "back-of-the-envelope" to mean it was an approximation, not taking into account things like differing spatial resolution as you move across the image, etc.
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Well, by the math they're using in that article, one meter is equal to four feet which is pretty inaccurate ( 1 meter actually is about 3.3 feet).
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Neil Armstrong must have had some pretty big feet!
(Never mind, as someone else pointed out, it's incorrect. 24000 pixels doesn't give that kind of resolution)
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... nothing will.
Correct! We have a winner!
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There really is no way to argue with or convince them short of flying them up there for a personal look-see, and of course that would never happen.
Why would that convince them? They'll claim that you flew them to the Arizona desert and are just pretending it's the moon.
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Open the window.
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One would imagine that the gravity differences would make it clear, too, but they're also welcome to keep walking until they find the walls.
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It should be high rez enough to see the leftover junk from the manned landings. If this doesn't shut the moon landing conspiracists up, nothing will.
I appreciate your optimism, but these guys got the backing of a self-proclaimed photographer who doesn't understand how bounce cards work to offer his testimonial. I don't think that group is going anywhere no matter what is found.
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If this doesn't shut the moon landing conspiracists up, nothing will.
All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...
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They are not going to show you the masonic lodge and the giant space communications array that the aliens built in 1207. Just give it up. You will have to join and become a master mason in order to even see the photos of it, and become worshipful master before you can go there.
Now I need to go kill myself as I have revealed far too much. My brothers will be here shortly to torch the house... hopefully they torch the right one this time.
Re:Anyone know the location of the moon landings? (Score:4, Informative)
All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...
Like this one [asu.edu] ?
They are all available - I would suggest you start by browsing the gallery [asu.edu].
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Uh, because official Arizona State University sites paid for by NASA are not prime goatse territory ?
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All of the Moon landing sites [nasa.gov] have high res [universetoday.com] images [nasa.gov] from LRO.
Heck, they even found the long missing Lunakhod 1 [nasa.gov], enabling it to be recovered by LLR.
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According to the NASA article,
the WAC maps nearly the whole Moon every month, in 7 wavelengths
Why do they give us only one?
White isn't a wavelength. They most likely took some or all 7 of the wavelengths and processed them together into this greyscale image.
These sorts of "cameras" don't take normal photographs. They are scientific instruments, and the data has to be heavily processed if they are to be made into useful and appealing images. None of the images from Hubble are how the things it's showing look, they are all false-color, which means the scientists gave each wavelength a color, and processed them together to give a
Alternate to download... (Score:2, Informative)
Alternative to downloading 500+ MB .tif from overwhelmed server...
Moon [asu.edu]
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SWEET! Google Moon! (Score:3)
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You mean like this [google.com]?
-molo
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Misread the summary (Score:1)
shows the Moon's nearside as never before.
Anyone else misread that as rearside? Time to lay off the porn.
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Anyone else misread that as rearside? Time to lay off the porn.
Well, that kind of porn, anyway.
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Photoshopped! (Score:2)
"good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots."
Yeah, right! It's Photoshopped.
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Two observations (Score:3)
One looks like a deep dry river bed around Archimedes. WTF is that? It's not shallow like the others (I guess lava flows?). Second, I see a short crater rows. I guess this is from a stream of some disintegrated meteor?
Re:Two observations (Score:5, Informative)
Crater rows are typically secondary craters (i.e., the stuff splashed out of some larger impact).
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LIES! (Score:3)
From the article : "The combined image shows slight banding where the 1,024-pixel-wide swaths were stitched together."
BULL! those are where the moon farmers were harvesting their moon wheat! It's all a coverup!
Slashdot Effect (Score:1)
That's no moon... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait. These pictures indicate it it is. Sorry, everyone! False alarm.
I'm so embarrassed.
Libration (Score:2)
I wonder how they compensated the libration in the timeframe they took the images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration [wikipedia.org]
And no, I didn't read TFA.
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They didn't take pictures from the Earth, they took them from lunar orbit... So there is no libration.
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Libration would apply to pictures taken from earth, not to pictures taken by an orbiting reconnaissance module.
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Librations are small variations in the rotation of the moon, either real ("physical librations") or apparent (the apparent ones - the "geometrical librations" - are caused by variations in the Moon's orbital motion, which is not uniform, and which changes slowly with time).
For a Lunar orbiter, the geometrical librations are irrelevant, and the physical librations are accounted for in the spacecraft ephemeris.
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And you'll sometimes find that tropical libations are served with cute little umbrellas.
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The pictures were taken from a spacecraft orbiting the moon, not from earth. Libration won't effect the spacecraft and more than it affects the sats that give us Google Earth images.
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It's assembled from orbital images, so they just matched up one image to an adjacent one. (OK, so it's not actually that simple, but that it the general idea.) Libration isn't an issue.
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There's sound in space?
She didn't read it properly (Score:1)
My wife got all excited by this story. She'd always told me that there were pixies on the moon.
Canada (Score:2)
Fast, smooth, zooming version at zoom.it (Score:2, Informative)
A zooming version is available at zoom.it [zoom.it]
mirrors needed (Score:1)
You won't be able to see the moon landing site (Score:3)
Off course you won't be able to see the moon landing site.
Some will tell you is because of resolution.
I say it is because New Mexico is not in the moon.
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Now how your trolling has been moderated positive to this point is beyond my understanding....
Just Amazing (Score:1)
Once I get my grubby paws on the entire mosaic, my copy of Rukl's lunar atlas is going up on Cloudy Nights.
Similar Earth image (Score:1)
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Here's one:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/136214main_BlueMarble_2005_west.jpg [nasa.gov]
And here's another (seriously, download it!):
http://www.google.com/earth/index.html [google.com]
Enjoy!
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Half a gig sounds impressive, but ... (Score:2)
If this were a JPEG it'd be around 40 MB.
So little from China (Score:2)
Amazing results from a small camera size. (Score:2)
I can't wait for the Virtual Moon Atlas to have this dataset available..
Blue cheese? (Score:1)
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