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China Moon

Panoramic Picture Taken By China's Moon Lander 125

Taco Cowboy writes "Perhaps it's not much, but China has released a panoramic view of the moonscape where their lander has landed. They 'stitched' up some 60 photos taken by 3 cameras on the Chang'e 3 lander, taken from 3 different angles — Vertical, 15 degrees up, and 15 degrees down. From the picture, there is a significant sized crater is seen, several meters wide, off to the left of Yutu, the (jade rabbit) moon rover, and located only about 10 meters away from the Chang'e-3 lander."
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Panoramic Picture Taken By China's Moon Lander

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  • It's 2013 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:06AM (#45787363)

    And this is the best image quality their chosen on-board imaging device can deliver?

  • Can't they focus that camera ?
  • by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:09AM (#45787387) Journal

    It's right there, on the lens, blurring everything!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is there news story you can link to? This is not news while there is no way of even checking if the summary matches the story.

  • by mbone ( 558574 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:13AM (#45787413)

    CCTV just announced [youtube.com] that the Sun has set at Mare Imbrium and the Chang'E lander and the Yutu rover both have gone to sleep for the night.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    please return my mickey mouse webcam

  • by mbone ( 558574 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:17AM (#45787429)

    The image linked to is apparently from the Universe Today [universetoday.com]. As the linked article says :

    To make it easier to see and sense ‘the new view from the Moon’, we have created screen shots from the rather low resolution TV broadcast and assembled them into a photo mosaic of the landing site - see above and below mosaic by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer.

    That's why it's fuzzy. It's screen scraped from a TV.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by markdavis ( 642305 )

      >That's why it's fuzzy. It's screen scraped from a TV.

      Well, certainly doesn't look like any "TV" I have been watching for the last many years!

      China- the 1950's called and would like their equipment back now, if you are done with it.

      • by mbone ( 558574 )

        I imagine it was a std def broadcast.

        Chang'E 3 has several cameras (as does the YuTu rover), following the MER standard of having "science," "navigation" and "hazard avoidance" cameras. One of the Lander camera pointing systems was designed in Hong Kong [phys.org]; I suspect that system made these images.

        Note - some of the published images were high-def (16:9 ?) and were just aired as 4:3 on the TV broadcasts, making the lander (to me) look squished on screen and screen-shots.

        • Chang'E 3 has several cameras (as does the YuTu rover)

          The rover's cameras cannot be used following an emergency injunction order from YouTube for trademark infringement. :-)

    • by lolococo ( 574827 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @03:17PM (#45789835) Homepage
      Well, in fact one of the commenters in this article linked to a set of much nicer pictures [xinhuanet.com]
  • by mu51c10rd ( 187182 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:26AM (#45787471)

    Wow, the Gobi desert looks eerily familiar to the Nevada desert...

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 26, 2013 @10:06AM (#45787669)

    And I'm sure China didn't pay for the license.

  • Huh (Score:1, Insightful)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    China's moon landing is a lot of ho hum, the real story here is they felt good about dropping the billions to go where we have already been (for no real purpose) while multitudes in their country starve and die.

    The entire mission was a hood ornament for some politicians cock.

    • Re:Huh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @11:14AM (#45788021)

      do you have any source for your claim that "multitudes" "starve and die", or did you make that nonsense up? Here's a fact for you, hunger rate in U.S. much higher than China

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Yeah, and I'm a Chinese jet pilot. They don't report real numbers, have vast problems with getting clean water and their nation has a serious problem with once fertile farmland turning to desert. If they had to drill a hole through a mountain to divert water flow just to feed a small army back in the empire building days, what makes you think I'm going to believe with so many more people that problem has just evaporated like their rivers?

        • bullshit, you are native english speaking AC writing nonsense. you are not chinese

          • Chinese Jet Pilot is a reference from the movie Army of Darkness. It's like saying: Yeah, and I played darts with queen of England. I believe he's saying your full of shit.
        • by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
          China is in a strange place right now in their development. On the one hand, they have fully embraced the digital revolution. On the other hand they are in many respects where the United States was at from the mid-1800's through the early twentieth century industrial revolution where we had even more elite vs. little guy than we do now by far. 10 years olds working 12+hour days in textile sweatshops, railroad building as virtual slavery. A substantial amount of the greatness and luxury that we have now in t
      • by koan ( 80826 )

        I do, it's called Google.

        • please provide link to the stories of those dying of starvation and malnutrition in China

          that's one problem they have solved

          • by Ocker3 ( 1232550 )
            Perhaps they got China confused with North Korea, where there are regularly huge problems with famines.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        USA Hunger is a totally different measurement from world hunger and 3rd world hunger. It is literately based on asking kids the question, "In the last 12 months* where you hungry at any time?? " Now, just so everyone is clear hungry in the USA means that feeling you get when you've eaten everyday at 6pm and now your stomach rumbles because it's 6:15pm. It's caused by your body starting the digestive process and not actually getting food. Also the more you spike your blood sugar up and down the more of this

        • have I known the U.S. government to tell the truth when it looks bad?

          you're funny

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        do you have any source for your claim that "multitudes" "starve and die", or did you make that nonsense up?

        Yup, saw it on Wikipedia. Millions starved as recently as ... 1961.

    • Are you sure you know what China is? While they care less for human rights than other countries, it is one of the biggest economies in the world, and nearly all other economies are dependent on them.

    • Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian@bixby.gmail@com> on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:03PM (#45789243)

      Chang'e-1, -2 and -3 **COMBINED** have cost about a billion dollars, or less than a dollar per Chinese citizen. The first two were orbiters/mappers, the third is the lander, all three have been complete successes so far. That war in Iraq that (IIRC) you were so enthusiastic about a few years ago? Cost of that is over $3,500 per US citizen. It was an utter failure.

      Even if this was just propaganda I think the Chinese have gotten the better deal.

      • by mbone ( 558574 )

        And, Chang'E 2 then went on and flew by [planetary.org] Asteroid (4179) Toutatis, as a bonus, for a tiny fraction of the cost of a new spacecraft launch.

        Scheduling that a few months in advance with a spacecraft that was not intended for deep space puts China up in the first ranks of spacefaring nations IMHO.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    such a shame to see all those comments making fun of China when we should be happy about their huge accomplishment!

  • There are no stars! ... and the shadows are wrong somehow! ... and the wave pattern proves something something something! ... and ... and ... there is no Moon!

  • where NASA faked the moon landing?

  • Firefly (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrflash818 ( 226638 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @11:15AM (#45788029) Homepage Journal

    ...good for them!

  • Hugin (Score:3, Informative)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @11:40AM (#45788191) Homepage Journal

    They should have used Hugin [sourceforge.net], an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.

    They need to visit the Vignetting [panotools.org] page to learn how to fix things.

    • We don't know how terrible the source images were. The curves at the bottom suggest there were only three input images, so the stripes may have been present in the individual images, and aren't the result of poor stitching.

  • Well done them and everything - I mean, I've not managed to put a probe on the moon - but when the USians are getting this [nasa.gov] back from Mars, I'd be pretty underwhelmed with my achievement if I were the Chinese.

    • by mlts ( 1038732 )

      I just wish our government would want to get some better pictures and send a probe up just to one-up China. It would make for better news than yet another government shutdown, doomsday counter until a budget default, or yet another celebrity having affluenza and ending up in rehab.

  • by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @12:43PM (#45788627) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Are we sure the thing is actually there, and these aren't pictures downloaded off the internet?
  • Scientists do not understand that people want to see a nice quality inspiring images from Lune, from Mars, etc. They are not interested in X-ray diagrams, or geological survey results.

    Still it is people who pay for these flights. I am sure it is doable to shoot good JPG files on Mars or Lune. And instead we get blurry low resolution images.

    I read that an engineer had to buy a photo camera for Mars rover with his own money. Otherwise we would not see any pictures at all.

    I think the best photo &
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Does this look like a sound-stage in Dong-bu to anyone else?

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