The probe that took this photo is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and it "was the first time a SpaceX rocket launched an object into deep space".
From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
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Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#62Someone tweeted this yesterday and some of the replies were really disheartening. Several people were calling it fake, with varying explanations of either "The earth is flat" or "Everybody knows the whole space program is fake". I knew people out there actually believe this, but damn...
Don't consider all comments to be honest, there are tons of bored trolls.
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#63What is the green "shadow" on the right of the moon? I'm not saying this is fake, but it looks like what I see in some greenscreen videos. I am really curious.
"EPIC’s “natural color” images of Earth are generated by combining three separate monochrome exposures taken by the camera in quick succession. EPIC takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband spectral filters -- from ultraviolet to near infrared -- to produce a variety of science products. The red, green and blue channel images are used in these color images.
Combining three images taken about 30 seconds apart as the moon moves produces a slight but noticeable camera artifact on the right side of the moon. Because the moon has moved in relation to the Earth between the time the first (red) and last (green) exposures were made, a thin green offset appears on the right side of the moon when the three exposures are combined. This natural lunar movement also produces a slight red and blue offset on the left side of the moon in these unaltered images."
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#64What is the green "shadow" on the right of the moon? I'm not saying this is fake, but it looks like what I see in some greenscreen videos. I am really curious.
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Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#65Why don't we see the Moon's shadow projected over the Earth in the pic? I guess it has to do with the relative distances of the 2 bodies to the Sun and the Moon's penumbra or something. Can someone make a digital image simulation of this to verify?
One rarely sees earth and moon to scale at the correct distance. I think this leads many of us to often have a broken intuition about these things. And while these new images are spectacular, the distance between moon and earth is not obvious here. Look at e.g. [1]. It becomes immediately obvious why the shadow of the moon will only hit the earth rarely (during an eclipse). If it's not obvious, try holding two real objects at the correct scale / distance in your hands and make one throw a shadow on the other.
At scale, if the earth was the size of a basketball and the moon the size of a baseball, they would be about 7.5m apart.
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#66What is the green "shadow" on the right of the moon? I'm not saying this is fake, but it looks like what I see in some greenscreen videos. I am really curious.
Probably artifacts from the rgb channels not taken simultaneously.
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#67What is the green "shadow" on the right of the moon? I'm not saying this is fake, but it looks like what I see in some greenscreen videos. I am really curious.
I think it's chromatic aberration[1], it's an artefact of the lens. I'd be interested to know why this lens seems to suffer so much from it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
Edit: apparently not based on other comments; will leave this here anyway.
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#68actual image http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/2015/fromamillion.png nasa website used up 20MB of mobile data then crashed my browser (stock android)
The image NASA links is actually a 3MB GIF
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/pu...
My iDevices accidentally work with the NASA page. If your device crashes it's because of the other unfortunate "modern" web development practices that are really too resource heavy. Somebody inclined to analyze more can certainly find a lot of problems with their presentation (I see a lot of articles are on the same page, for example).
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Earth is a sunlit object in this picture, the luminosity is the same level as during the day on earth - would you see stars in your photos if you took a correctly exposed photo of something during daylight on earth? I don't think this would happen :) The dynamic range difference between day light objects on earth and the stars on the sky is huge.
The satellite is 1 million miles away from Earth at the L1 Lagrange point. What is it about optics that allows us to compare a photo of the stars taken at such a distance with one taken from the surface of the earth? [Edit: "compare", in the sense of understanding whether or not the stars will or won't show up in each case. I get that the laws of optics are the same throughout the universe.] > The dynamic range diffe…
Eyes have about 24 stops dynamic range, there are sensors that have over 20 stops dynamic range with a single exposure, with multiple exposures (HDR) you can of course get way more than that.
The problem is that our monitors have very limited dynamic range - so even if the original had very high dynamic range, it would not show up properly on a current monitor.
There are HDR panels coming to the market this year which have more dynamic range.
And of course it's possible to tonemap HDR images for viewing on normal screens - there are various algorithms for that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping
Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
#70[deleted]