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Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

bbc.com

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Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#51
post #35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)

How do you know that they're stars? I believe they probably are stars as well (by visual comparison with a star chart, suitably rotated), but I've found no source for either claim. I did find multiple sources, including TFA, for the brightest being Venus.

Why would you think they are not stars? Not really sure the confusion on the matter. Are we leaning towards this being shot from a soundstage?

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#53
post #36
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment history suggests you're in the US, so you should be pleased to learn that you weren't included. The visible landmass is northern Africa, with a smidge of the Iberian Peninsula visible.

South America is visible on the right, and it looks to me like part of North America might also be pictured close to the horizon. Higher-resolution image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...

Oh, good point. I missed South America under the cloud cover. I guess the Eastern edge of the US would indeed be visible as a highly distorted smudge on the edge of the visible surface.

For a view of roughly the same half of Earth, but with less clouds, if you rotate the image clockwise by 150 degrees you get roughly this viewpoint of the earth: https://earth.google.com/web/@3.63731074,-23.1618975,-2690.7...

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#54

Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tower. Why can't we see the poles? And is that an ice wall on poking up in the lower-right quadrant of the disk?

Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific. When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily…

I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".

Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.

For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.

However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.

If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.

This planetary reclassification was not the first.

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)

However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.

Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.

> This is all CG. Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.

ahem, Kubrik

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#57
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)

Who said you can't capture stars in space? What do you think the purpose of Hubble, JWST, etc are? There's also plenty of imagery taken from ISS that clearly show stars. I've definitely seen Orion in some of that imagery and it put a different perspective on the size of the constellations when seen from that angle.

Photos from the moon landings don't have stars in them, because they are exposed for full daylight on the moon.

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#58
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)

Who said you can't capture stars in space? What do you think the purpose of Hubble, JWST, etc are? There's also plenty of imagery taken from ISS that clearly show stars. I've definitely seen Orion in some of that imagery and it put a different perspective on the size of the constellations when seen from that angle.

I referred to the common question (or accusation) of why there are no stars in, say, the Apollo photos taken on the moon. The answer is, of course, that you can't see stars if you're exposing for something bright and sunlit, like the day side of Earth, or the lunar surface.

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#59

Anyone find the full res version of this ? Nasa images page is useless. Government work.

I don't understand why media, such as BBC, keep uploading heavily compressed versions of photos that could be beautiful. The original has grain, sure but that's not a problem. The BBC version is horrific. Are they trying to save on bandwidth in 2026?

Re: Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

#60
post #26

How come the pictures have such bad quality ? Is it a bandwidth issue ? Or there are really constraints that are not so obvious ? Because fundamentally it is a large object illuminated by sunlight.

No, it's BBC's compression of that image.

Look at the original: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/

It's grainy, but the detail is terrific.

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