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."

Hey!

[kidlinux]

I can see my house from here!

Re:Hey!

[billimad]

if you look real close you can see a tiny flash of light as a web server goes up in flames.

Re:Hey!

[Elwood P Dowd]

It is, after all, from the I-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

Re:Hey!

[dotgod]

I can see my house from here!

Hey! I didn't know Bill Gates read Slashdot!

Very nice.

[Randolpho]

Or rather, it would be, if it weren't already slashdotted. :(

I hope one day to see that picture "in the flesh".

Re:Very nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

"in the flesh"

Typical Slashdot. We get an amazing photo and already we are looking for the pr0n angle

Re:Very nice.

[terkozer]

National Geographic has picked up the article as well...

It can be found here [nationalgeographic.com]

Re:Very nice.

[polymath69]

Space.com [space.com] has the pictures, and is not (yet) slashdotted.

another mirror

[abhisarda]

Here's another Mirror [lycos.co.uk]. Do not mod this up if the other mirrors are holding up fine.

Re:Very nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want the full resolution tiffs (and jpgs too) look at the jpl site:

jupiter and moons [nasa.gov]

earth and moon [nasa.gov]

itty bitty earth and jupiter [nasa.gov]

Fake fake fake

[grub]

That picture has been Photoshop'd. We never landed on the moon. Consume. Marry and reproduce.

Re:Fake fake fake

[Drathus]

Well, it's a good thing then this pic was taken from Mars' orbit then, isn't it? =)

(Yes, I know you post was humor. =P)

Re:Fake fake fake Jupiter full/Earth half image

[klui]

Guess all those "we didn't land on the moon" folks will say that the full image with Jupiter will say it's a fake, too. Why is it that one planet is half-full while the other is full? Space.com says since Jupiter is beyond the sun. The orbital diagram helped, too.

Re:Fake fake fake

[KewlPC]

For those not in the know, it should've been "Consume." and "Marry and Reproduce."

They're from the John Carpenter film They Live [imdb.com], in which aliens are trying to take over the planet, and have bribed some human leaders into helping. The aliens masquerade as humans, and insert subliminal messages into advertisements. Roddy Piper, who plays the protagonist, finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see things as they really are. There's a scene where he walks outside and sees some billboards. Then h

Re:Fake fake fake

[KewlPC]

It's also the movie that Duke Nukem 3D stole the line "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." [imdb.com] from.

Already /.ed

[BWJones]

Done, fin, kaput. Man, there has got to be some system in place to temporarily mirror sites before posting on Slashdot, yes?

Re:Already /.ed

[feepness]

Done, fin, kaput. Man, there has got to be some system in place to temporarily mirror sites before posting on Slashdot, yes?

Yes, but then Slashdot wouldn't have a reason to sell subscriptions? It occurs to one that Slashdot now PROFITS from Slashdotting.

Ethics aside, I doubt they will fix it anytime soon.

Re:Already /.ed

[flewp]

What about offering the mirrors to subscribers only?

Re:Already /.ed

[Fesh]

Better yet, how about selling an advanced warning subscription? You buy the subscription and they email you before the link goes up for the reader subscribers to warn you that you're about to get nuked...

Y'know... Just in case something were to... happen.

Re:Already /.ed

[BWJones]

Off topic? What did this get modded as off topic for? The site was slashdotted, so what else is there to talk about except the effects of slashdotting?

Re:Already /.ed

[heff]

dont bother..some of the mods are power trippers. it goes along with that whole bastard operator from hell/god/superioity complex thats found in the computer circle.

Mission Accomplished

[Renegade Lisp]

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. But surely, they did wait until North America was in full view for the image? If not, who would recognize the Earth, after all?

But humor & politics aside, this is a great picture. You would think that just for this picture a considerable fraction of the mission's budget would have been justified.

Re:Mission Accomplished

[DNS-and-BIND]

How else are you going to be able to say, "Hey, there's my house!"

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.

Re:Nice pics of home

[bill_mcgonigle]

Staggering that they could even get that pic.

They didn't, technically. The camera on the MGS is grayscale. They used stock photos to apply color to the images. They're totally forthcoming about this and the technique [msss.com] if you go straight to the source.

Is this first post?

[mshiltonj]

The damn site is already slashdotted.

Images look funny

[dtolton]

I was looking at those images and for some reason they just didn't look right to me. If you browse down the page a bit, you'll see that not only was the moon "processed" into the image. Essentially the entire "earth" and Jupiter images were "processed" as well.

Why does Jupiter look so big in that picture? Did anyone catch what magnification that picture was taken at? Jupiter was behind the earth, and a long ways away, why does it still look so big?

Looks like the server puked under the load, hopefully

Re:Images look funny

[goober]

Why does Jupiter look so big in that picture? Did anyone catch what magnification that picture was taken at? Jupiter was behind the earth, and a long ways away, why does it still look so big?

Is this a joke or a troll? Or both?

It looks big because it is big.

Re:Images look funny

[Sinus0idal]

Why does it look so big!? You kidding? Uh, probably because Jupiter is 11.2 times larger than Earth, and has a mass 318 times that of Earth... Any maybe due to the fact that Jupiter is more massive than all the other known planets in our solar system combined?

Re:Images look funny

[DJ Rubbie]

Jupiter is still more than 10 times larger than the Earth, and since it is more than 5 times away, it makes sense the Earth is about half as large as Jupiter in the picture. It may not look that way because the Earth is a crecent in that picture.

Re:Images look funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Or am I missing something?

3rd grade science, apparently.

I'll give you a hint:

My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas

Re:Images look funny

[antis0c]

I downloaded the unprocessed images of Earth. The only difference is Earth is colorized, and the moon brightness is enhanced.

Re:Images look funny

[travisbecker]

Why does Jupiter look so big in that picture?

From one of the astronomy programs I have, I was able to get this data for 08-May-2003:

Earth-Mars range: 1.398e8 km
Jupiter-Mars range: 9.438e8 km

Earth radius: 6378.12 km
Jupiter radius: 71492.35 km

So using

size = atan( radius / range )

we obtain apparent sizes from Mars:

Jupiter: 0.0043 deg
Earth: 0.0026 deg

So Jupiter should be almost twice as big, even though it's almost 7 times farther away. One can probably also figure out the magnification based on the image.

Travis

Re:Images look funny

[fiiz]

Hehe,

thanks, thanks, thanks.
I was actually wondering, and couldn't be bothered to do the calculation myself.
It's nice to see something that's not a wild uninformed guess every now and then on /.

Keep it up, and, guys, *mod parent up.* ;-p
from a thankful astrophysicist.

Re:Images look funny

[JudgeFurious]

Not quite. His mamma's shadow is the black thing behind the earth and Jupiter.

Re:Images look funny

[escher]

Jupiter appears that large because when you zoom in at that magnitude objects appear as if they were closer together. Don't believe me? Go grab a video camera and try it out.

my description of dead link

[Brigadier]

Well since it's slashdotted let me describe it for everyone. it looks like the picture they took from the moon only .... muuuch much much smaller

Only US residents should be allowed to view images

[Anonymous Coward]

Europeons can launch their own damn surveyor!

Re:Only US residents should be allowed to view ima

[johannesg]

Like this [esa.int] one? Give it a break already, it launches in just ten days...

"Improving" the photos

[Soulfader]

I like how they explained how they combined and colorized the pictures. I can't help but think, however, that the temptation to "improve" it a bit more with giant Earthbound meteors would be nigh overwhelming... =)

Mirror?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Whoa, I was gonna try and mirror these images ... but to no avail! The webserver stopped dead during the subscriber preview time. Oh well, here's a BitTorrent link for everything I was able to get before the site went down:

BitTorrent images mirror link [bounceme.net]

Mirror

[realdpk]

Or maybe this is "another mirror" by the time I finish posting this. The site is getting pounded hard. This is just the JPEG that was linked to, not the entire site.

429319 byte JPEG [dpk.net]. It's on a beefy connection, have a blast.

It's really too bad /. doesn't have any consideration for other sites when they post links.

Re:Mirror

[Migrant Programmer]

Thanks for the mirror, it was mighty fast =)

I cropped up a wallpaperable version of the image that you can get here [uwaterloo.ca] (9821 byte PNG). It looks nice on a black desktop.. sure puts things in perspective!

Re:Mirror

[Boiling_point_]

Thanks for your link. It amazes me that people still post 429K jpegs when the same image quickly converted to PNG is 39K without losing anything. An 8 bit GIF is 8K and given the nature of the image, losing the colour doesn't really hurt much at all. Sniff sniff... won't somebody please think of the bandwidth!!

Re:Mirror

[realdpk]

jpegtopnm < earth_jupiter_100.jpg | pnmtopng > earth_jupiter_100.png

PNG version [dpk.net].

Enjoy. :)

Btw, I don't know if anyone cares, but the average download speed for people hitting the JPEG link is so far 58.3KB/s. Not that I'm arguing against posting smaller PNGs, I was just curious and maybe other people were too. :)

Re:Mirror

[dimator]

Try this: open the png in one tab, and the jpeg in another. Switch back and forth; they look exactly the same.

Moral of the story: use png. :)

"Proccessed" the moon in?

[192939495969798999]

So the moon is indeed a projection from the ground, and we blew it up during a botched nuke test?
HA! I thought so!

Another Pic

[BurritoWarrior]

From National Geographic:

Pics [nationalgeographic.com].

Another mirror

[Renegade Lisp]

here. [fu-berlin.de]

This is only the main page, all links point to NASA.

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.

Re:Better format?

[Lxy]

what about PNG? it should give you an image of comperable size without people lashing about how evil Unisys is.

Re:Better format?

[CWCarlson]

Indeed. Converted with the Gimp at compression level 6, this 429,319 byte image shrinks to a mere 40,714.

Not bad, for a 24-bit non-lossy image format.

--- Chris

Re:Better format?

[robsimmon]

Actually, the raw (black and white, not contrast adjusted) image is saved as a GIF - and it's still pretty big 'cause there's some invisible noise in the black.

In any case, JPEG does LZW (or similar) compression as a final step, so a JPEG would also have been very small if the noise was removed.

Re:Better format?

[fobbman]

Don't feel guilty and save it as a PNG. I saved it at quality 6 and got it down to about 34k.

Re:Better format?

[KewlPC]

Except that GIFs can only have 8-bit indexed color, which means you've got a maximum of 256 different colors.

Both PNG and JPEG support 24-bit true color (which uses 8 bits for each channel, and is not indexed), giving a maximum of around 16.7 million colors.

Europa

[Fastball]

All these worlds are yours to explore except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

Celestia

[msheppard]

Pretty kewl to enter the date/time May 8, 9:00Est, navigate to mars and see the rendered view for yourself. Celstia lets you do this, it's a free solar system simulator. Really high-quality too IMHO. It gets the image pretty close. Make Jupiters moons a little brighter, and the earth is too clear, but it's still an educational exersize... but then again what isn't.

M@

Re:Celestia

[Anonymous Coward]

Celestia homepage [sourceforge.net]

Where did all the stars go?

[Goalie_Ca]

I see planets but no stars? Am i missing something!?

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.

That's no Earth...

[LordHunter317]

It's a space station!

*rimshot*

This picture is OLD

[Kaz Riprock]

I'd say over 5000 years old! This picture was one of the last ones taken by our ancestors before they boarded the last ships off of Mars towards Earth. After laying waste to all of Mars' natural resources and destroying the atmosphere, they needed a new place to call home. With the buildings and cars turning into fine iron dust under the heavy beating of the UV rays of the sun, they took one last snapshot and headed for Earth. Of course, there was a problem on the ride here and the computer lost all of its memory with only the hairdressers and accountants surviving the trip...

I think you know how the rest went.

It's good to see the picture's survived this long...it bodes well for Kodak and Fuji in our future.

Astrology on Mars

[smooge]

So I wonder what my horoscope would be if I lived on Mars?

New Trek theme?

[Tablizer]

"On a five year mission thru the dangerous Omicron nebula to figure out who the f8cking hell slashdotted Earth!"

Boom

[szquirrel]

If you examine the image very closely, you can see their server. The explosion is visible from space.

Makes you realize how big Jupiter is...

[mooman]

If you go to the space.com [space.com] website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.

We all know Jupiter is big but this rare chance to phyicially see it compared to our own planet is kinda profound...

or maybe I just need to get out more.

Re:Makes you realize how big Jupiter is...

[djtack]

If you go to the space.com website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.

This is partly due to the long focal length of the lens. It distorts perspective, the same way a photographer can make the moon apear much larger by taking the picture with a long telephoto, at a distance from the subject.

But no doubt, it was inspiring to see Earth and Jupiter in the same frame together.

Re:Makes you realize how big Jupiter is...

[ashitaka]

One word: Celestia [shatters.net]

Nasa is good at this

[Anonymous Coward]

"apparently the Moon had to be "processed" into the pic"

I suspect it must be done pretty well ..considering they have experience processing the moon into pics ever since they did it with Neil Armstrong back in 1969.

not slashdotted yet.

[Unknown Poltroon]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/22may_alie nearth.htm?list522264

Or at least i can still see it.
YEp, whorin for karma.

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?

Optimal image format

[Wonko42]

Is there some reason why this image, which is mostly black with just a few colored fingernail-sized areas, needs to be a 419K JPEG? When I converted it to a 69K PNG, I couldn't even tell the two images apart.

Re:Optimal image format

[Wonko42]

This was PNG-8, which is limited to a 255-color palette. There was some dithering involved, thus the reason for my comment.

Not the first far-earth pictures

[TFloore]

NASA has been doing cool pictures from far away for a while. Two that are worth looking at:

Solar System Family Portrait [nasa.gov]
This one is nice, but earth is really only about 4 pixels, so you can't see all that much detail. :) This is a Voyager 1 picture taken in 1980, I think.

Saturn in shadow [nasa.gov]
This is a nice shot of Saturn by the Galileo probe, taken with about half the planet in shadown. Read the write-up there, it's kind of cool.

Slashdotted !! Don't worry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pics are here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/05 22_030522_earthmars.html [nationalgeographic.com]

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=62 4&ncid=753&e=10&u=/ap/20030522/ap_on_sc/earth_from _mars [yahoo.com]

Here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=11583 [spaceref.com]

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030 522/168/45jfk.html [yahoo.com]

Here:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/05/22/earth.mar s.ap/ [cnn.com]

And Here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/World/viewo fearth030522.htm [go.com]

ASCII of earth from mars

[Andreas(R)]

The server is /.'ed, here is the ASCII-image of earth from Mars:

.

Smooth

[_ph1ux_]

I read someplace that the earth - on scale is more perfectly smooth than a machined steel ball bearing. If you were to scale the nicest ball bearing you could find to the size of the earth it would have pits and ridges, mountains and valleys far larger than anything on earth.

Earth looks pretty smooth from these distances

Grayscale? Grayscale?!?!

[Esion Modnar]

And how much did they spend on this thing?

They take one of the coolest pics ever, and they do it with a grayscale camera...

*rolls eyes*

oh great

[cr@ckwhore]

awesome! We slashdotted mars

Hmmmm, interesting

[JWSmythe]

So, I decided I couldn't see details well enough, so here in our office, we opened up the pic in GIMP.. If you adjust "Brightness" and "Contrast" all the way up (127 on each), illuminated objects really stand out..

I'm looking at something I don't understand though.. What we're looking at is the full shapes of the objects, plus refraction from the atmosphere, right?

The "Earth" is a vertically aligned rectangle with bright bars of red, green, blue, with splatters of yellow and aqua. There's a grey box coming off the left side.

The "moon" is a white dot with a black and white checkerboard pattern going to it's right.

Jupiter now appears as a larger white blob, with only a little bit of blue at the bottom, but instead of a diffused pattern, or even a finite box around it, there are three boxes, stretching from the top, left and a smaller from te right.

The right-most moon only has a tall rectangle with a similiar checkerboard pattern to the Earth's moon.

The far left moon has a lesser pattern than the Earth's moon, but it's still aparent.

The 2nd from the left moon has a distinctly different pattern.

What we're finding most pecular is that there are absolutely no stars aparent in this picture.

From the Earth, Mars looks like a bright star, in a field of stars.. Shouldn't a view from the same distance (Mars -> Earth = Earth -> Mars) have a similiar sky view? At least the larger stars should jump out at us in this picture. At least we should be seeing more stars by cranking the contrast all the way up... I'm not expecting like spectacular starfield views or anything, but I'd expect at least one..

This honestly looks like a serious photo-shop job. Someone took a black background, dropped on a few very small images, with Jupiter being the only one with distinct patterns.

It's seriously missing stars.. Bringing the contrast up a bit should at least show *SOMETHING* in there.. Looking at a night's sky from Earth, even with the city lights, if you can see Mars, you can see huge starfields.. I don't think I've ever seen Mars, and not seen any stars...

I wanna see a real picture..At least that'd be cool. :)

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).

Re:Hmmmm, interesting

[SiliconEntity]

In my experience, looking at Jupiter with a telescope, it is not uncommon to see stars nearby that are somewhat fainter than Jupiter's moons. It's surprising to me, given the large area of the photograph, that no stars appear bright enough to show up, since Jupiter's moons are quite bright looking in the picture.

Here's one example I found with google, someone's photo of Jupiter and Venus [saker.com]. It's a little similar, you see Jupiter in the lower left with 3 moons, and Venus in the upper right. And there are a

Re:Hmmmm, interesting

[Zakabog]

Someone explained this before, but if you want a picture of the planets with stars, the planets will be overexposed. If you want the planets exposed correctly the stars will be too dark to see. Besides turning up contrast and brightness isn't going to expose the image more, if I take a picture with a 1/2000 shutter speed of a dark room, no amount of brightness, contrast, changing will make it a clear picture.

Re:Hmmmm, interesting

[laughing_badger]

Astronomer, image processing guy, blah blah... Right, there will be sufficient light from the sun scattered from the illuminated atmosphere and then rescattered from the dark hemisphere towards the camera to make the dark hemisphere visable. You can see a similar effect by looking at a half moon on a dark night. You will be able to see the 'dark' side of the moon illuminated by light that has been reflected from the surface of the Earth. Its called Earthshine.

Yep, bang on about most of the effects that the parent saw being compression artifacts.

Ok, now as to why there are no stars. The Earth recieves a lot more solar radiation than Mars (distance squared). Presume that the albedo (amount reflected) is the same. So you have a lot more photons going into your camera if you take a picture of the Earth from Mars than vv. This means that you can use a shorter exposure and hence less stars will appear. Then do JPEG compression and watch the few point-like stars get smoothed out. Also, we don't know what else has been done to the image. Subsample and point like stars can go.

If you want to hunt around in the depths of an image looking for cool stuff, start off with an unprocessed original.

Holy Percival Lowell, Batman!

[tlambert]

Holy Percival Lowell, Batman!

I *swear to God*, there's *canals* on Earth!

-- Terry

Re:"Processed" into the picture?

[GammaTau]

As if the people who claim the NASA missions to the moon are hoaxes didn't have enough ammuntion already...

Oh, come on. The Moon is a Propaganda Hoax [revisionism.nl]. The Mad Revisionist is even offering $100,000 for anyone who provides them, by e-mail, conclusive physical evidence of the existence of the moon.

Re:"Processed" into the picture?

[Grandmasta]

It was processed into the picture BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST! We never landed on the moon -- THE MOON IS A HOAX!

okay, I'm done. ^_^

Re:"Processed" into the picture?

[Clomer]

Sadly, you're probably right. Fortunately, they explained exactly how it was "processed" and why, as well as provided links to the original, unprocessed images.

The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to get a good, unprocessed image of this type because of how much of a difference in brightness there is between the Earth and the Moon. I once read somewhere that the moon only reflects about 10% of the light that hits it. It's dark grey, essentially the color of asphalt, but it looks white in t

Re:"Processed" into the picture?

[geekoid]

they have NO ammunition. There 'evidence' is caused by the fact they have no understanding of basic photographic principles, and think the the moon is just like the earth.

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[KrispyKringle]

Seems like a good way to test my pII 400:

mirror here [dnsalias.net].

If you can, mirror it somewhere else, too.

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[eclectro]

Thanks, I appreciate deeply those who mirror and make the world better :)

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[Binestar]

Well, the server is handling it, but the T1 is showing signs of strain.

My log file is moving so fast it's just a blur on a tail -f =)

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[KrispyKringle]

Yeah, I'm mirroring from you as fast as I can (2.5K or so). I think that's you, not me, as my downstream is a lot faster than my up. Fun fun fun, though; I never get this many hits on this box.

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[Binestar]

Try again... just restarted apache, and the load seems to be letting down a bit.

Re:Slashdotted before out of "The Mysterious futur

[Overly Critical Guy]

Please do not mod this up

Did people just outright ignore this request, or what?

Re:Martian and Bugs Bunny

[cmburns69]

oooh this makes me very angry!

An online Starcraft RPG? Free, only at [netnexus.com]
In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
Karma: redundant

Re:Martian and Bugs Bunny

[cmburns69]

Yup

An online Starcraft RPG? Free, only at [netnexus.com]
In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
Karma: redundant

Re:What happened

[AlabamaMike]

Ahh ... one who hasn't heard of the moon shot conspiracy. Basically, the stars are of much lower magnitude than the celestial bodies being imaged, and therefore they don't show up in this picture. Many have tried to claim that evidence of the vast NASA conspiracy lies in the fact that no stars are to be seen on any of the photos taken by Apollo astronauts. If you've had any exposure to physics (or if you can perform logical deduction on your own) you'd be keen to why this happens the way it does.
-A.M.

Re:*Sigh*

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

If only I could see this with a backyard telescope.
Of course you can, you just need to be in somebody else's backyard.

--

Re:"Processed"? WTF does this mean?

[interstellar_donkey]

So clouds are patriotic protectors of liberty?