NASA Releases New High-Definition Image of Earth 106
New submitter klchoward writes "Working for NOAA, I have been really pleased to see the weather data from the new Suomi NPP satellite coming into our computer models already but have been blown away by its capability to take stunning high-definition images of our planet. See the article at Huffington Post or go straight to the image at NASA's website." Reader derekmead has some images from further afield, too: these beautiful images of Mars come from NASA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Link to original size pic. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/618486main_earth_full.jpg
Re:Where is all the "green"? (Score:4, Informative)
The picture was taken a few weeks ago. The high-latitude and high-altitude parts of North America aren't very verdant this time of year.
Re:Too Large (Score:4, Informative)
Actually on further inspection it seems that this was electronically generated from sweeps of the Earth, and therefore they could've chosen any perspective they wanted, but the horizon distance in the image is correct for someone looking from 500 miles above that spot.
It's not a photograph (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty, but it's not a photograph of the earth. It's CG; a rendering of a sphere texturemapped with images of the surface of the planet that they captured. Neither NASA nor huffpost are misrepresenting what it is, but there's something special about the original blue marble, which is an actual *photograph* of the entire planet, not something thrown together in 3ds max.
Suomi :-) (Score:4, Informative)
As a Finn, I'm glad to have "Finland" (in Finnish) up there in orbit :-)
Re:Link to original size pic. (Score:2, Informative)
Original data sets suitable for conversion to texture maps are available. Start with these links:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484
Re:Suomi :-) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Link to original size pic. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure I'm following where you're leading. This is a composite; it's a composite of Earth-view swaths of a sun-synchronous polar orbiting earth observation satellite. The "native geolocation space" of the images is a swath approximately 3000 km wide and tracking under the orbital path of the spacecraft (i.e., ground-track Mercator). This image is based on reprojecting those swaths to the geoid, so it looks like you're floating above the Equator and looking down at Earth.
As to anti-aliasing, I dunno. This isn't a standard product of Suomi's ground system, so whatever aesthetic and technical decisions are reflected in this image are entirely on the NASA folks who did this.