Russian satellite's 121-megapixel image of Earth is most detailed yet | Hacker News Reader

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

theverge.com

75 pointspwg34 comments

"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.

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/

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

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.

Could also be chromatic aberrations too from poorly coated lenses.

Edit1: Check out the edges of the world. Wonder what the issue there is?

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.

Which is especially fascinating when comparing it to the Earth at night - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.j...

Yes, that is why I specified daytime. I had not seen a full composite image, before, thanks. I find it interesting how uniform the lights look across the planet. I try to simultaneously remember how much we are affecting this planet and how little.

Raw data if you're interested: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html#AVSL...

fun features: the nile, the trans-siberian railway, the island of south korea

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

Would be a fun project, perhaps, to chop it up into tiles, host them on amazon s3, and use the CATiledLayer class to build an iOS viewer - or the equivellant in one's platform of choice.

You can see it on Gigapan, works on iOS: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/103187

"Size 1.12 Gigapixels"

There was a down-sampling step somewhere between the source image and that Gigapan image.

The image went from 0.121 GP to 1.12 GP, It was not down-sampled, it's the oposite. Maybe to meet Gigapan's minimum 1GP?

On the video you can see how the Sun reflects from the Earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hdyRh60R-Q

Original data from the Russians:

Night Day animation - http://eng.ntsomz.ru/electro/el_061011

I only wish it were color corrected. It's hard to appreciate it when it looks so unnatural.

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.

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.

Around 2000 I used xplanet with the night lights + the sat weather cloud overlay. Is there anything better now?

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.

1 pixel = 1 km, according to the article.

I'm waiting for the 1 pixel = i minecraft block map now.

Title is wrong. NASA's Blue Marble is about 3.7 gigapixels.

Blue Marble is a compilation from several different instruments. The new "photograph" was taken with a single satellite all at once.

The recently-released Blue Marble image was from several different overpasses (six to be exact) but only one instrument on one spacecraft.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_21...

Where's 'Merica? This photo is biased.

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