291–300 of 419 posts
Why didn't NASA or the news agencies rotate the image so North is up? and slightly to the right. That would make Africa instantly recognizable as that's how maps are imprinted in our brains. There is no "up" in space, so that wouldn't be editing the image I feel. The camera just happened to be oriented "upside down".
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
There's something a bit weird having these digital photos and crisp digital audio and video of the astronauts, and seeing pictures of mission control with flat screens after having grown up on grainy analogue video, crackly audio with lots of beeps, and mission control being choc full of CRTs being watch by men in short sleeve shirts with black ties and cigarettes.
Looking at the EXIF (with exiftool) for the image uploaded by NASA ( https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019... ), apparently this was taken by a Nikon D5 with an AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED and developed with Lightroom. It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom. Amazing... I dumped the whole EXIF here: https://gist.github.com/umgefahren/a6f555e6588a98adb74eed79d...
I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200. Incredibly impressed at the steady hands for a sharp image at 1/4 s shutter speed though! Maybe they just let the camera float in space with the mirror up, triggering it remotely.
In this special situation you get as many as you can a few dozen at least. Then only publish the one that looks the best. If it's f4 then f4 worked best.
I was confused when I first saw this photo, as I don't think I've ever before seen a nightside, moonlit Earth, exposed so that it looks like the dayside at a first glance. I wonder how many casual viewers actually realize it's the night side. A nice demonstration of how moonlight is pretty much exactly like sunlight, just much much dimmer. In particular it has the same color, even though moonlight is often thought of…
What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sunlight is yellowish in atmosphere since some blue's been scattered by the atmosphere[1], but it's white in space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering
I don't think that's right. Sunlight is white in the atmosphere too. Scattering causes the sun , not the light, to look yellow, and so sunlight is thought of as yellow.
But when the sun does look yellow, its light is yellow too, that’s the definition of "looks yellow". And the golden hour paints everything in very iconic yellow-orange hues. The light as integrated over the whole sky is still white (modulo whatever’s scattered back into space), but the light that comes from the direction of the sun is clearly tinted yellow and the light from the rest of the sky is clearly tinted blue.
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
The launch, shot on a Nintendo 3DS.
For those with a gen z-like retro tech streak.