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From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

nasa.gov

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Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#121

Post by nitrogen »

SCAQTony wrote: post #110
UserRights wrote: post #74

It is really cool how the NASA gives us a better understanding of the universe and our place in it by publishing all these nice pictures. However, I would like to have one easy accessible source for all the nice pictures that is daily updated and could be synchronized to a local school server e.g. with rsync. Is there one "ḧere-are-all-the-pics"-ftp server anywhere? It is quite time consuming to browse the hundreds o…

I agree. Presentation is everything and images from the Voyager, Cassini, Hubble, the Mars landers, New Horizons, have done so much to inspire writers, artists, and has gotten kids interested in Science. A repository of images would be amazing and provide a terrific return on investment intellectually, artistically, and even monetarily if a small fee was charged to maintain it.

Those pictures have already been paid for by taxes. We should not have to pay for them again.

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#122

Post by Retric »

vinhboy wrote: post #119
exodust wrote: post #100

Here's what one million miles looks like side on...(whipped up in Photoshop) Best viewed at 100%. The image is more or less to scale. Scroll a million miles to the right to find moon and camera. (don't worry it's only a 300K jpeg) http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/earth-moon-from-million-miles....

Dang.. it never occurred to me how big the moon is. Looking at this picture, it's hard for me to comprehend why the moon would orbit the earth and not fall into the sun.

If you take the earth away the moon would still be orbiting the sun.

So sure, the moon is far from the earth, but that just means it takes ~28 days to orbit the earth.

PS: The moons orbit is actually 29.5 or 27.3 days depending on how you count it.

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#124

Post by nitrogen »

ised wrote: post #99
UserRights wrote: post #74

It is really cool how the NASA gives us a better understanding of the universe and our place in it by publishing all these nice pictures. However, I would like to have one easy accessible source for all the nice pictures that is daily updated and could be synchronized to a local school server e.g. with rsync. Is there one "ḧere-are-all-the-pics"-ftp server anywhere? It is quite time consuming to browse the hundreds o…

The image, without the Javascript: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/dsc... Interesting note (from NASA?) to visitors embedded in the page: (function($) { $.reject({ display: ["msie", "firefox", "safari", "opera", "chrome", "gcf"], reject: { msie5: true, msie6: true, msie7: true, msie8: true, msie9: true, firefox2: true, firefox3: true, firefox4: true, firefox5: true, firefox6: true, firefox7:…

That popup is incredibly annoying on mobile and the close link doesn't work in the Android browser.

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#125

Post by Tuna-Fish »

vinhboy wrote: post #119
exodust wrote: post #100

Here's what one million miles looks like side on...(whipped up in Photoshop) Best viewed at 100%. The image is more or less to scale. Scroll a million miles to the right to find moon and camera. (don't worry it's only a 300K jpeg) http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/earth-moon-from-million-miles....

Dang.. it never occurred to me how big the moon is. Looking at this picture, it's hard for me to comprehend why the moon would orbit the earth and not fall into the sun.

The gravitational influence of the Sun on the Moon is greater than the gravitational influence of the Earth. In a very real way, the moon is orbiting the Sun.

However, the orbit it flies around the Earth only very slightly modifies it's orbit around the Sun. The lunar orbital speed around the earth is ~1km/s, while the orbital speed around the sun is ~30km/s. That is, it never loops backwards on it's path around the sun, it's orbital velocity is at most only reduced by about 3%.

Picture from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_trajectory1.svg

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#126

Post by visakanv »

nitrogen wrote: post #121
SCAQTony wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Presentation is everything and images from the Voyager, Cassini, Hubble, the Mars landers, New Horizons, have done so much to inspire writers, artists, and has gotten kids interested in Science. A repository of images would be amazing and provide a terrific return on investment intellectually, artistically, and even monetarily if a small fee was charged to maintain it.

Those pictures have already been paid for by taxes. We should not have to pay for them again.

you wouldn't be paying for the images, you'd be paying to have somebody do the grunt work of organizing them, presenting them, etc

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#127

Post by catbird »

exodust wrote: post #100

Here's what one million miles looks like side on...(whipped up in Photoshop) Best viewed at 100%. The image is more or less to scale. Scroll a million miles to the right to find moon and camera. (don't worry it's only a 300K jpeg) http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/earth-moon-from-million-miles....

Really nice! Are the stars from an existing picture, or did you generate them somehow?

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#128

Post by exodust »

catbird wrote: post #127
exodust wrote: post #100

Here's what one million miles looks like side on...(whipped up in Photoshop) Best viewed at 100%. The image is more or less to scale. Scroll a million miles to the right to find moon and camera. (don't worry it's only a 300K jpeg) http://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/earth-moon-from-million-miles....

Really nice! Are the stars from an existing picture, or did you generate them somehow?

Google images copy and paste the same image a few times, then rotate/flip each instance to avoid the tile effect.

Earth and Moon from NASA.

BTW, 80 pixels in the image is approx 7917 miles (diameter of Earth). Width of image is 10,080 pixels, pretty much 1 million miles. Moon is 238,855 miles from Earth or about 2400 pixels in.

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#129

Post by catbird »

exodust wrote: post #128
catbird wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really nice! Are the stars from an existing picture, or did you generate them somehow?

Google images copy and paste the same image a few times, then rotate/flip each instance to avoid the tile effect. Earth and Moon from NASA. BTW, 80 pixels in the image is approx 7917 miles (diameter of Earth). Width of image is 10,080 pixels, pretty much 1 million miles. Moon is 238,855 miles from Earth or about 2400 pixels in.

Very cool, thanks for the info.

Re: From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

#130

Post by lcswi »

sgustard wrote: post #117
kjs3 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you automatically think all or even most Twitter comments are from Americans?

Not all, just the dumb ones! Also, two-thirds of native English speakers are in the US.

Nativity does not matter. Did you think I was a native speaker? I am not.
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