NASA deep space scope serves up EPIC Earth snapshots NASA has unveiled a portal serving daily images of Earth snapped by its Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). Screen grab of the new EPIC images site From a distance of roughly 1.5 million kilometres, at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, the spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) will …
Resolution around 6 miles according to the article which is pretty damn good at that distance. The smallest object that can be picked up by Hubble on the moon would have to be the size of a football stadium.
It isn't just about lenses, everything, subject and cameras are moving fast.
This is obviously a flamebait, but I am going to bite:
couldn't be anything else, there isn't even a shadow on the earth from the moon.
You have to wait for the 8th of March next year my dear to see the shadow of the moon on the Earth surface. On the picture in question the moon is off the line between Sun-L1-Earth enough not to throw a shadow.
Do not fret, it will be there next year. At least that is what the solar eclipse calendar says. The same calendar says that there was no total solar eclipse in the equatorial lattitudes and the southern hemisphere (so you can see shadow from L1 with _THIS_ moon traversal) in 2015. The rather small partial in September 2015 is not likely to have been very visible as it was close to the polar regions during the early polar spring (so bad sun angle to observe from L1).
In fact it would have been fake if you _COULD_ see a shadow, because there was no instance so far when this particular sat could have taken the picture of the shadow
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The satellite isn't actually at L1 (despite what the article says), it is orbiting L1. This is why you can see a slight shadow on the right side of both moon and earth: the satellite is not directly between sun and earth.
p.s. it is a Lissajous orbit, which never puts the satellite directly between sun and earth, and is unstable which means the satellite must actively use propulsion to prevent itself from drifting off.
Stop being so inspired human! Get back to fighting for every resource, bombing for peace, designing weapons system, demonizing other humans from the same blue dot and being so totally scared out of your mind that you can't even question the current system that pits all tiny humans against each other. It divides us by all sorts of pointless things that make no sense.
Stop with your dreaming of perfect wonder on this planet. That kind of lovely thought will not be tolerated. We are all in debt for trillions....must be the aliens...Pay to live on the blue dot...it is your destiny...look...
IIRC NASA did allocate a bit of Hubble time to photograph the surface of the moon. Since the resolution was still greater than the size of the objects (lander, rover etc) they were not visible. However the Rover tracks in the dust were visible.
Of course I may have dreamed all of this.
In one of the BOFH stories the BOFH tells the boss that the PFY thinks that the 'the-moon-landings-were-a-fake-conspiracy-theory' was in fact started by NASA after they actually did land on the moon - in order to cover up what they really found there ...
(Can't remember which episode. Can't be asked to look it up right now.)
"The living rock creatures in a cra**y horror sci-fi film"
This one? It wasn't so bad.
The remake sucked balls though.
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
It is odd to me on how the Earth looks in the image. Although stunning I guess the fact we have seen both artist impressions as well as photographs before it looks a bit like a nicely rendered CGI image.
Of course I know it isn't but when you see images of the other planets such as Mars and Pluto then they seem to look more real to me. Maybe its the familiarity of pictures of Earth?
Cassini images of Saturn is another planet that makes it look like a CGI image. In fact when viewing it through a telescope it looks like a picture out of a text book!
Anyway fascinating stuff especially what with the Moon transit.
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