An Epic View of the Moon In Earth's Orbital Embrace 77
astroengine writes: As a suitably impressive follow-up to the new "blue marble" image of our world released in July, NASA shared a gorgeous animation created from pictures captured by NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles (1.5 million km) away — over four times farther than the moon. In a series of images acquired between 3:50 and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, 2015, the moon can be seen passing in front of a rotating Earth, the warm gray face of its far side framed by the swirling-cloud-covered blue water of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The north pole is at the 11 o'clock position, illustrating our planet's 23.5-degree axial tilt.
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I know, right! It doesn't look a day over 4000 if you ask me...
*sighs* I never *really* know what to expect. Poe? I think not. Maybe...
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Due to the libration of the Moon, about 9% of the far side is visible. If you look at map [wikipedia.org], you can see it is enough to see some areas characteristic of the far side, although at not very great viewing angles.
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What is wrong with you losers -- These photos are supposed to have been taken by GoreSat 1.
And Al Gore is fat.
That is all you need to know.
Beautiful. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is all.
How many colors? (Score:1)
It's pretty cool but it also seems super low color, like someone converted it to gif with the standard websafe palette from the 90s. I was really hoping that this was hardware launched two decades ago, because then the colors would have felt very appropriate :/
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I second that emotion.
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Hey now... What's love got to do with it?
Re:How many colors? (Score:5, Informative)
The youtube version shows a lot more color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMdhQsHbWTs
Unfortunately, because of the way the images were taken, with separate exposures for the red green and blue colors, the moon is slightly blurred and has a color fringe around it. This is further compounded by the extremely flat light, rendering the moon in the image rather featureless.
What I found most interesting about this image is that it really shows how dark the moon is. It's something to think about when looking at the seemingly stark light of the full moon. Imagine how bright it would be if it was snow white.
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Also took some fantastic full moon selfies, sent them to the mayor, ended up in the bin, again.
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My school, a private boarding school named Kent's Hill, was given a moon rock and it was in a special cabinet but we handled it in Geology. They came, later, and stole the rock back - said it was not allowed or something. I have no idea why. My understanding is that they then gave the school a tree. I am not sure how the tree was to replace the rock that they stole but, well, something about treaties and bad form? I really do not understand it, at all. They brought bag bags full of rocks and the school alre
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What I found most interesting about this image is that it really shows how dark the moon is. It's something to think about when looking at the seemingly stark light of the full moon. Imagine how bright it would be if it was snow white.
It doesn't look that dark to me; it looks about the same brightness as the land on Earth. I guess it's Earth that's rather bright because of all the H2O being quite reflective.
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Liquid H2O has a few percent reflectivity, not that different to the Moon's basalt (more-or-less basalt, some anorthosite too). What makes the difference is the presence of floating aerosols of droplets of liquid H2O in the atmosphere of the Earth, which has a reflectivity up in the 60s and higher of percent.
Phase matters. (And in this case, changing phase involves a lot of latent heat moving in either direction.)
That's no... (Score:2)
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... "It's a binary planet [wikipedia.org]."
Seriously the Moon is crazy large relative to the Earth. The Earth-Moon doesn't currently meet the most commonly accepted definition of "binary planet", although it will in a hundred million years or so. On the other hand Isaac Asimov proposed a very reasonable definition of "binary planet" which the Earth/Moon system meets; you can read about it in the link above. I think it figured in one of the Foundation stories.
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The earth-Moon system is not binary by strict definition, because the center of mass around which they orbit is still about 1,000 miles inside the Earth. But that's enough for the Earth to wobble noticeably as it orbits the Sun.
Tilt isn't 23.5, it's 23.4, to get 66.6 from 90 (Score:3, Funny)
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It's pitch black outside my house when I Skype with my friend in Japan. The sun is high in the sky there. Explain please.
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It's all explained right here, http://www.sacred-texts.com/ea... [sacred-texts.com]
Any other questions?
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The sun sets every day by going below the horizon. This text claims it does not. Explain please.
Re: Tilt isn't 23.5, it's 23.4, to get 66.6 from 9 (Score:2)
Easy: you're a heritic for questioning well established scientific principals. Plase report to the town square to be tarred and feathered. (Also, plase bring some tar and some feathers).
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You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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You are full of shit, because EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE [timecube.com]
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I agree. The entire image is only about four times the Moon's diameter wide, which means (if my calculations are correct, bwa ha ha!) the Moon only travels through about 1-1.5 degrees of arc during the video (which is why DSCOVR could shoot it in only 5 hours). The effective pull of the Moon on the Earth is pretty much straight toward the observer the whole time.
But there are no real depth cues, so it's hard to judge that the two bodies are nearly a quarter-million miles apart.
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You make a very good point.
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I'd hesitate to call that person a "researcher". Those rolling distortions he filmed are pretty easily explained as some sort of atmospheric distortion - the very simplest possible explanation. Call me when we see a video of the moon with rippling distortions while filmed from orbit.
I think the reason this particular NASA image looks "fake" is because we have no frame of reference for it. We almost never see the back side of the moon, nor are used to seeing it crossing in front of the Earth. Moreover, t
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show us your assumptions and calculations, please.
The moon is not a giant hologram projected by alien technology.[1]
[1] common fucking sense.
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You really can not prove anything, at all, exists with mathematics. You can only infer that your measuring is accurate. In other words, you can not prove that you are real - all you can prove is that you can measure it and observe it. You can not even be certain that you're measuring it in any valuable method. Math does not really prove anything other than the chance of something being true within an applied framework. It is really a matter of probabilities and certainly not proof - only that it can be show
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Do we not have anything better than gifs for animating small clips like this?
Webm. Its amazing and I'm shocked that so many people haven't caught the new wave yet.
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What was obviously humor was taken serious and they thought you were trolling? Hmm... Maybe they have not seen your other comments? I thought it funny. I might have smoked a wee bit of weed but, still, I thought it was funny. Then again, the comments that are joking about the moon-landing being faked (obviously jokes) are modded down as well. Maybe it is a ritual that I do not understand.
I have seen this sort of things in other, past articles, where obvious humor was assumed to be a troll or flamebait or wh
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And had we not spent the money, the same people would still be literally starving to death.
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The "whitey is not on the moon, he's just taking photos" argument.
P.S. This is GoreSat 1, the Republicans have spent decades trying to avoid it being launched.
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You forgot the most imperative of questions my good sir or madam... "Y'ear me?" It seems silly to ask it so frequently. It is usually at loud volumes so, really, unless the indications are that one can not, in fact, hear them then they should, by all means, not need to inquire about it as loudly and frequently.
I say this, as a mixed race and being a partially black person, "Cut that shit out." You're not a Verizon commercial. We have many, many dialects of English in this country - including Ebonics. None o
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Easier and more fun to hack ATM machines with some acetelyne.
Earth brighter than Moon - surprise? (Score:2)
“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”
The Moon has an albedo of about 0.1 (similar to coal), while Earth's albedo is three times greater, so this isn't really very surprising at all.
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Not surprised because of the water, but was pleasantly surprised at seeing the reflection of the moon on the ocean from a million miles.
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You're just restating what it means to be "brighter". To remove the surprise you have to find a mundane explanation for the difference in albedo.
The surprise should be removed by the fact that we've known each body's albedo for decades. I was surprised that the a space scientist working on DSCOVR wasn't aware of the differences in albedo, or was aware but hadn't actually pictured the difference in his mind. It just seems odd for someone in his position to be surprised by this.
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There is actually a concept that explains this sort of thing!
It is called 'qualia'
The big idea is that no matter how much you understand an idea, no matter how detailed your mathematics, abstract understanding, or information about underlying biological processes may be the actual experience is different than be be imagined or described. These experiences are qualia.
Another way of thinking about it is a short story:
Anne lives in a world that is monochrome. There is only shades of grey to her
Re:Earth brighter than Moon - surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one thing to know the numbers. It's another thing to see those numbers in action.
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NASA link (Score:2)
Article on NASA site: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86353&src=iotdrss [nasa.gov]