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Space Science

Earth as Art 143

Posted by michael from the we-trace-the-wide-design dept.
bravehamster writes "There's a new exhibit at the Library of Congress displaying images taken of earth by the Landsat satellites. The exhibit displays satellite photos that have an intrinsic aesthetic quality, showing the beauty of Earth as seen from really far away. There's an article about it on MSNBC here, and don't forget to check out those fjords!"
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Earth as Art More

Earth as Art

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  • Mmm.. fjords.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Asmodean451 ( 71567 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @01:55AM (#4816865) Homepage
    Someone give Slartybartfast a prize...
    • First prize: A Slashdotting! (No, it isn't yet, I'm actually getting over 80KB/sec on the big fjord picture, but it will happen! Just you wait and see!)
      Second Prize: ???
      Third prize: Profit!!!

      Nope, that one is even more out of date. Hm, how about "All your fjords are belon*thump*

      ...

      I feel better now. Thanks.

    • Re:Mmm.. fjords.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by /Wegge ( 2960 )
      Slartibartfast designed the Norwegian fjords, not the Icelandic.

  • fjords (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those Icelandic fjords have nothing on Norway's award winning fjords.

  • Pac Man! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 05, 2002 @01:59AM (#4816873)
    See if you can find the large 3/4 circle that is eating the smaller circle in the Garden City, KS plot. This is probably the only one that looks more interesting now than it would have before man changed it.
    • The West Fjords are a series of peninsulas in northwestern Iceland. They represent less than one-eighth the country's land area, but their jagged perimeter accounts for more than half of Iceland's total coastline.

      I'm surprised that I am the only one to point this out:
      How can the fjords represent 1/2 of Iceland's coastline when they have a inifinite length (due to being fractal)?? Please advise.

      • Fractal fjords? Fjords are no more fractal than real life trees with branches and leaves. Do not confuse computional/mathematical representation/aproximation/generation with the real world. (I am sure there will be some funny replies to this.)

        • Re:Pac Man! (Score:3, Informative)

          by grammar nazi ( 197303 )
          Do not confuse computional/mathematical representation/aproximation/generation with the real world.

          Whoa!! Your crazy way of thinking seems so new and revolutionary to me.

          Seriously, though, fjords can be approximated by fractals. To show this, all one needs to do is implement a fractal box counting algorithm to the image in question. Fractal box counting will show that the fjords have a boundary that is approximately 1.4 dimensions (rather than the typical 1-dimensional boundary of a circle or square) and thus, can not be measured with a finite 1-dimensional measure such as length. Thus the coastline length can be approximated by infinity. Everybody knows that anything remotely close to infinity is still infinity (e.g. \infty - 1,000,000,000 is still infinity), thus the coastline is infinitely long, at least in 1-D.

          This message is a queue for all of the Dynamical Systems Mathematicians to step in and correct me (although I think I am correct).

          • I don't specialize in dynamical systems, but I do know what a queue is.

            Fractal box counting will show that the fjords have a boundary that is approximately 1.4 dimensions (rather than the typical 1-dimensional boundary of a circle or square) and thus, can not be measured with a finite 1-dimensional measure such as length.

            Both the land and water are made of atoms, so your approximation breaks down at small scales, and you end up with a finite path length. The problem is that you are applying fractal box approximation, a mechanism suited to morphological representations, to a calculation of length, for which it was not designed.

            Thus the coastline length can be approximated by infinity.

            Instead of approximating the length, you just extrapolated a pattern from limited data to well outside its applicable domain. Here's an analogous example. Suppose I have one dollar in my wallet at time 0, two dollars at time 1 minute, 4 dollars 30 seconds later, and 8 dollars 15 seconds after that. Clearly, my wealth is doubling at an asymtotic rate. Would you approximate my wealth at 2 minutes by infinity? Everybody knows that anything remotely close to infinity is still infinity, thus I have infinite wealth, at least in your imaginary world.

    • Yes! Found him! There are actually 3 pac-men in the picture...Anyone found a ghost?? Or fruit??
    • They're crop [berkeley.edu] circles [airphotona.com]!
    • I've long wanted to get a group of like-minded farmers organized to plant their circularly-watered fields in a dot-matrix pattern so we could spell out stuff to communitcate with aliens.

  • beowulf (Score:1, Funny)

    by denisonbigred ( 611860 )
    earth... imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
  • Actually, those photos look a lot like abstract paintings (and for once are not symbolic but actually *OF* something!) and are attractive enough that I'd rather look at those in a meuseum than some of the more famous Picaso types.

  • Sissy. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jonny-mt ( 631306 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:03AM (#4816884) Homepage
    Earth art is lame. Give me some good old-fashioned rock porn [heatherfirth.com] any day!!

  • 16 bit screen saver? (Score:2, Informative)

    by schatten ( 163083 )
    Neat pictures, but the screen saver is 16bit and doesn't run on the systems noted. I hope someone updates this.
  • And safe from those pictures. I guess that's why we're only "Mostly Harmless"
    If only people would look at these images and realise why everyone should chill out and relax.

    nich

    -- I was going to be a tree huggin hippy but my laptop kept running out of power

  • abstract paintings (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As with abstract paintings, any viewer can choose a meaning -- no human artist has designed them.

    good, that means i see jesus and/or the devil in every one of the photos.
  • I get the Slartybartfast reference. I guess what you're really trying to say is that, recognizing the Earth as art would make the Magratheans proud.

    On second thought, they probably wouldn't care since the program's already cocked up since we're from Golgafringam.

    Hey that explains Slashdot! (Re: useless 1/3, self included. :-P )

  • Download a printable poster TIFF file... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0biJon ( 593687 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:04AM (#4816890)
    It's really nice that they are providing poster size prints for download...
    Most other places would give you a small thumbnail and ask you to pay for the full size version.
    These one's are pretty cool:
    http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/gr eenland_hires.jpg
    http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/ak patok_hires.jpg (I wonder what the red stuff in this one is?)
    http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/ir aq_hires.jpg

    • My favorite is... (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrewCapu ( 132301 )
      The Lena Delta, Russia:
      http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/ images/le na _hires.jpg

      As for the red stuff, I think I came across one photo with red that indicated vegetation of sort. But I doubt that colors always mean the same thing.

      The article makes note that some colors [are] "assigned arbitrarily to represent data -- such as levels of heat -- not visible to the human eye."
      • The red is usually associated with vegetation.

        Landsat and its relatives can use an infra-red channel which is particularly sensitive at detecting vegetation.

        This is then mapped to red in the final image. Or it can be processed as green - but the colour is usually a little 'off' of what you'd expect.

        Gorgeous images though, the Iceland picture is breathtaking.

        Best wishes,
        Mike.

    • Re:Download a printable poster TIFF file... (Score:4, Funny)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @04:17AM (#4817226)
      Oh, well done. Find the biggest image files on the site and post the URLs on slashdot. What are you, a sadist? At least you didn't make 'em hyperlinks...
    • I like the poster sizes just as much as the next guy, but think about why we're getting it (hint: try out irs.gov). "Most other places" wouldn't post the full version free because they'd lose money.
    • http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/images/ak patok_hires.jpg (I wonder what the red stuff in this one is?)

      I was involved in making these images. The red stuff in the Akpatok Island scene is clouds. I used an infrared band combination to bring out the highlights on the island, but as a side effect the clouds are not as bright in the bands used for green and blue.

      Oh, boy, we're getting slashdotted today. Gotta warn the sysadmins (assuming they don't already know).

  • Earth from above (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mxyzptlk ( 138505 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:12AM (#4816908) Homepage
    Don't forget the exhibition Earth from above [fujifilm.com] by Yann Arthus-Bertrand! Yes, I admit it's in another league - the photos in EFA are taken from planes, but there are some really nice gems in there.

  • The Sat Pics (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tempelherr ( 559964 )
    These pictures are stunningly beautiful, especially in the Scandinavian area. I noticed the news announcement on another site a few days ago and I fell in love with the picture of the Icelandic peninsulas. They're nice enough to provide rather detailed images, and I've been using that one as my wallpaper image ever since.

    I do hope they expand their collection a bit in the future though, as though the ones they have are amazing, I would really like to see some more, especially in the area of Europe, which seems to be somewhat lacking.

    • The pictures are stunningly beautiful. It's just the next bit of evidence that global warming is real. The earth is HOT, when looked at in the correct way.
    • We tried to get pictures from every continent. The problem is that in general, natural places were more aesthetically pleasing than regions with a lot of man-made structures. Europe, sad to say, is wall-to-wall with man-made structures. But if we have another art show (which seems likely) I have candidate images from Skaggerak, Iberia, and the Carpathian mountains we may use.
  • C'mon people, it's late, don't you people sleep or something?
    • It's not late until you can see the sun in the east. And before someone asks, the old computer in your garage doesnt count.
  • from the MSNBC article:

    Landsat-7 covers the entire surface of the earth every 16 days.

    Frick man, that's a LOT of surface to cover.

    Frankly, I'm too amazed by this to come up with a whity remark to make this post any more interesting...

  • The next time a hurricane hits Florida... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:27AM (#4816943)
    ...don't panic. It's art!

  • Colours? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bakes ( 87194 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:34AM (#4816968) Journal
    Nice pictures, although the colours appear to be a bit artificial in some of them, in particular the green in the Brazilian shot. It would have been nice to see an un-enhanced photo for comparison.

    • Re:Colours? (Score:2, Informative)

      by gunga ( 227260 )

      The colours are artificial. Landsat doesn't take photographs.

    • Re:Colours? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Remus Shepherd ( 32833 )
      The colors are not 'artificial'. Landsat 7 takes data in 7 wavebands of light, only 3 of which are the red, blue, green we can see with human vision. In the Parana River scene, we used band 4 for green. That's our 'vegetation' band, and anything with chlorophyll shows up very bright in that band, thus looking very green in that image.

      So the colors are not artificial, they're just using frequencies of light that you normally can't see.

  • Aww com'on (Score:5, Funny)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:35AM (#4816974)
    Like the Earth would just happen to be that nice looking from space. This just goes to prove that we didn't land on the moon because we didn't even make it into space because if we did we would have ordinary ugly pictures of the earth rather than these that were obviously done by an artist. Now excuse me but my tinfoil hat is starting to get smelly and it's tiem to change it. Now don't think I'm paranoid or anything but I don't think the government is spying on me with satellites I mean they didn't even make it into space! I need it to protect me from cancer due to the radiowaves randomly bouncing off clouds the government filled with metals and chemicals to control the weather [slashdot.org] and bounce off signals to simulate satellites (they can't launch anything into space of course). Well goodbye I hope the intelligent immortal mainframes at the FBI logging my keystrokes don't decide this is unamerican or anything and steal my heart to put into Dick Cheyney!

  • Has this been proven? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't like to be a conspiracy theorist, but the moral community holds that the Earth is a fixed point in space, and much of the secular astronomical community holds that there is no "special" reference frame and that the Earth rotates the Sun. Personally, I would hate for the USGS and NASA to be attacking the Lord. I am not convinced that these pictures are real.

  • printed versions (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you [nasa.gov] can get something like this in print for free
  • There is an aesthetically very pleasing series of photographs done by photographer Arthus-Bertrand on behalf of UNESCO.

    However, the purpose of this series is also to show man-nature interaction. Both the book and the exhibitions in various cities all over the world were a great success.
    There are pictures on the web, but on the web they are not as nice as the printouts.
    picture index [fujifilm.com]

  • >>showing the beauty of Earth as seen from really far away.

    or in other words

    Good from far, but far from good?
  • God is an artist... or maybe I should say science is artistic. Yah, I think I believe more in that, especiall when science is let acting on its own accord (which would be nature).
    Coming back to the pics themselves, I couldn't find pics of the "Rama bridge", the one which as been in the news recently. It's a mythological bridge supposedly constructed by Rama and his devotees from India to SriLanka. They found evidence of this bridge thanks to... you guessed it... satellite imagery.
    There were some striking colors, I wonder it that's the natural actual color, or if its the atmosphere playing optical tricks.

  • Look what you did. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jchawk ( 127686 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:56AM (#4817053) Homepage Journal
    Well forget about a manned missioned to mars, NASA just spent the last of it's budget on bandwidth.

    Thank you slashdot! /Laugh it's funny
  • These are the most beautiful images i have ever seen. kinda makes me want to go to those places... esp the fjords. Seriously, the beauty nature has cant be paralled by any manmade thing. Many will differ.. but this is what I think.

    For those of you who enjoy nature..... and nature pics just go to google and then advanced image search and then wallpaper sized. Put in things like landscape... trees... starts.. hubble and you will see wonders.

    The first time I saw hubble telescope pics [stsci.edu] i was dumbstruck that things so beautiful could exist.... now I realize they exist on our own earth. yes my friends there is more to life than slashdot ;-)
  • the most amazing thing is not how beautiful it is, nor it feeds the intelligence creatures, but how these intelligence creatures take all of these for granted and ruin it, each and every day.

    sorry, a little bit offtopic.
  • Earth's stark contrast of water, ice, cloud and land cannot be beat. The other planets are very beautiful, but nothing comes close to Earth.
    • Earth's stark contrast of water, ice, cloud and land cannot be beat. The other planets are very beautiful, but nothing comes close to Earth.

      For variety and detail, I'd take Earth; the unique effects of life all over its surface have made an incredible difference. But then we're biased; our eyes have evolved to use the colour palette used on Earth, so of course it looks good to us. Take a look at Jupiter in radio or magnetic spectra some time...

      From a non-homeworld-chauvinistic view, the jewel of the Solar System can only be this [nasa.gov] one. Pick a spectrum, any spectrum, it's still magnificent. Even buy a cheap telescope and just look at the thing. That's going to be the mother of all tourist attractions five hundred years from now.

    • I guess 2 things contribute to that feeling.

      1) The Earth's our home. Nothing like a subconscious "geo-Oedipal" complex.

      2) We might have missed out on some very good terrains on those massive and far planets. Will have to wait for 2-3 decades for better photography.

  • The other obvious joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by hazyshadeofwinter ( 529262 ) <{arto} {at} {telusplanet.net}> on Thursday December 05, 2002 @04:28AM (#4817245) Homepage
    That's your Norwegian Blue, see, he's pining for the fjords. [nasa.gov]

    Fifty posts old, and nobody else misquoted the obvious Python reference. And you call yourselves nerds...

  • If you are interested in Earth Pictures (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kinniken ( 624803 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @04:29AM (#4817247) Homepage
    Check out the Blue Marble pictures [nasa.gov]. A resolution of 1 pixel/per kilometers for the whole of the planet, which makes the full pictures 40000*20000 pixels big =) They are available in different views (cloudless, with or without the sea floor relief, at night...) and are truly amazing.

    I'm probably going to get a -1 for promoting my own soft, but if your computer cannot handle a 2 gb file in RAM, check my website [kstudio.fr.st]. I made a soft (approved by the guy who made the picts) for viewing them without much RAM. Only works on macs and PCs, though I'm thinking of a linux version.

  • Finger in pic! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Somebody always gets their finger in the way!
    http://astroboy.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/whi rlpool .html

  • More and better pictures at a NASA site... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @05:22AM (#4817358) Homepage
    This contains load of images taken by the space shuttle. Well worth a look... Earth From Space [nasa.gov]

  • Available on DVD (Score:1, Informative)

    by bfandreas ( 603438 )
    The bavarian TV station BR is broadcasting a similiar programme on a nightly basis. They call ist "Space-Night". Hours of beautiful earth views with a funky soundtrack. Since they are doing this, I always go to bed with the TV running. You can order the DVDs at the online shop [br-shop.de]. German only. You'll have to ask the fish.
  • I don't see the fnords.

    Oh, FJORDS. oh, yeah, I see those, those are coo.

  • Wow! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those pictures are out of this world

  • Study / Counter Study (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @06:40AM (#4817504) Homepage
    A short time ago the chief chicken-littles of the International Association of Environmental Alarmists and Extreamists (IAEAE) were collectively diving under their beds over a study showing how nearly every sq. inch of the planet has been hideously despoiled by nasty ol' humanity. Well, now comes a counter-study [bayarea.com] (partly funded by Gordon Moore) which claims "46 percent of Earth is still wilderness" - a salve sure to sooth the conscience of dollar sign-blinking land developers and construction workers everywhere.

    Thus proving that, like statistics, politicians can pick a study to prove any damn thing they want. Meanwhile the truth continues to elude the media manipulated public.

  • re: dunes (Score:2, Funny)

    by prell ( 584580 )
    from the page: Namib-Naukluft National Park is an ecological preserve in Namibia's vast Namib Desert. Coastal winds create the tallest sand dunes in the world here, with some dunes reaching 980 feet (300 meters) in height.

    ::spits out milk:: *pfff!!* 980 feet??
  • You mean that the goverment can see us from above?

  • It's a shame . . . (Score:2, Insightful)

    by theghost ( 156240 )
    It's a shame that you have to get so far away to appreciate the beauty, what with all the intolerance, hatred and war getting in the way up close.
  • slashdot is regularly getting trafic from google. Being both a reader of slashdot and news.google.com, i found it funny that when i was perusing the science news on google the top level link for the "earth as art" story went to slashdot.org.
  • If anyone is interested in Mac OS X screen savers, I just made a few of all 44 pictures. I am in the process of uploading it to here:
    http://144.92.10.251/download/SlideSaver/ [144.92.10.251]

  • They produced a similar series when I worked there in the early 90s. I don't know if it was in an exhibit at the LOC, but they did produce a booklet that could be purchased. They are a very dedicated, hard working group of professionals.

  • Interesting.. Actually, recently I was watching the television and I saw some man who took pictures of his wife while she was pregnant. Not just her wife.. but her baby as well and says his pictures are art. His 'art' shows various pictures of the baby and when he was basicly mush to when he looked like a human. The pictures also show rejected sperm attempting to get into the sperm.
  • If earth wasn't artistic, Slartibartfast wouldn't have earned all those awards for his norvegian fjords and coastline!!!
  • Pictures of earth has always been a mainstay of art. They were just done a from a closer vantage point and were called "landscape paintings".
  • I go to this site, and I get some dumb web portal, with a link on it that says "If this is wrong site, click here".

    Then it says "The reason you run into a wrong site is your name server sometimes make wrong and provide wrong ip address to you."

    So.. not that I have any idea why my nameservers would be resolving nasa's domains to some guy's dumb portal.....

    anyone else get this?

  • Ironically, this was submitted (and rejected) earlier today; faulting myself for not having checked for this thread before submitting (or acting before.)

    The "Earth As Art [nasa.gov]" images are also available for Mac OS X v10.2 users as a .Mac (dot-mac) module for Screen Effects. Type in "EarthAsArt" as the .Mac Membership Name in the preferences to get the show going.

    The images were mangled with .Mac Slides Publisher [apple.com] and the resulting slide show [mac.com] tweaked to include PDF intertitles.

    The imagery is a pick of about ten random images from the about fourty images available, randomized daily by a Perl script and pushed to the site with HTTP::DAV [webdav.org].

    Prior art disclaimer:

    [hypsis:~] uucee% HEAD http://homepage.mac.com/EarthAsArt/.Pictures/Slide %20Shows/Public/aleutian-1.jpg
    Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 22:23:36 GMT
    Last-Modified: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 02:25:50 GMT

    The "EarthAsArt" .Mac account is a trial account expiring 1/15/2003, and in no way affiliated with the oganizations the imagery originates from.

    Enjoy.

  • This is a similar site that is more art related. It was a public art fest held in chicago. http://www.earthfromabovechicago.org/ [earthfroma...hicago.org]
  • I love the way New Zealand is now part of australia, also a pity there's no pics of NZ, there's some great scenery there, and an overview of middleeart would have been great.

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