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Russian satellite's 121-megapixel image of Earth is most detailed yet

75 points| pwg | 14 years ago |theverge.com | reply

34 comments

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[+] sp332|14 years ago|reply
"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"

- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.

[+] benologist|14 years ago|reply
It's amazing how The Verge, CNET and Gizmodo all failed to add any value to this story, they just extracted it from the source site instead and each tossed in some links to their own trash.

http://planet--earth.ca/

[+] Rexxar|14 years ago|reply
It seems colour channels are not properly aligned. There are green/purple artefacts around clouds.

The "aliens" snapshot, just show this : http://gigapan.com/gigapans/103187/snapshots/274815

[+] indiecore|14 years ago|reply
I can't source this or anything but I seem to recall someone mentioning that the extra green/purple is actually near infrared that is getting scattered back and interpreted by the camera for scientific purposes.
[+] joshuahedlund|14 years ago|reply
I'm still fascinated by how completely uninhabited most of the earth looks in the daytime from this distance. I honestly can't see any signs of civilization from a cursory glance at this image. Maybe I could if I knew what to look for; I'm curious what features you could see at 100% view on the full image.
[+] TomGullen|14 years ago|reply
Ok can someone help me out here, I'm going to the zoom version of it here: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/103187

But it seems, well, quite underwhelming? I zoom in a bit and it just goes low res very quickly. I was expecting to be able to go a lot deeper.

[+] SpiderX|14 years ago|reply
It's a single photo of the entire earth from space. 121 megapixels is good, but it's only 10x the 12 megapixel sensor of my current camera. It's good, but it's not Gigapixel good. However, it is the highest resolution single photo that contains the whole earth in it. You can find better ones that are stitched together, but none that are a single image from a single instance in time.
[+] sigmaxipi|14 years ago|reply
What I find really peculiar is how the colors after composition and postprocessing are so different from the other images of Earth at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble It seems similar to the problem of determining the 'true' color of the Martian sky: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128...
[+] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
They haven't adjusted these to be true colours - the article says the rust colour is an artefact from combining images from the infra-red and the other colour cameras.
[+] Nate75Sanders|14 years ago|reply
The one comment on the site is exactly the question that I want to know as well:

Where can we download the full-size image?

[+] horv|14 years ago|reply
According to this site http://planet--earth.ca/ (Go to Electro-L Images, then Image Gallery) the full image is too expensive to host and he's providing a torrent soon.
[+] xefer|14 years ago|reply
I only wish it were color corrected. It's hard to appreciate it when it looks so unnatural.
[+] KVFinn|14 years ago|reply
I really want to a real time version of this as a Desktop. There are a million virtual Earths but there's something alluring about the idea of seeing a real time image of the planet.
[+] oofabz|14 years ago|reply
Allow me to recommend OSXplanet and xplanet. They are as close to a realtime image as you can get, and they are designed for use as a wallpaper.
[+] guylhem|14 years ago|reply
Around 2000 I used xplanet with the night lights + the sat weather cloud overlay. Is there anything better now?
[+] K2h|14 years ago|reply
Great picture - be warned, does not include North America. First thing I wanted to do was see if I can see my house, and from what I can tell, I can't even see my country.
[+] mturmon|14 years ago|reply
1 pixel = 1 km, according to the article.
[+] nix|14 years ago|reply
Title is wrong. NASA's Blue Marble is about 3.7 gigapixels.
[+] sp332|14 years ago|reply
Blue Marble is a compilation from several different instruments. The new "photograph" was taken with a single satellite all at once.