

Russian satellite's 121-megapixel image of Earth is most detailed yet - pwg
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/12/3016254/russian-satellite-earth-from-space-121-megapixels

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sp332
"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.

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benologist
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/>

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Rexxar
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>

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indiecore
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.

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rtkwe
Could also be chromatic aberrations too from poorly coated lenses.

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

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joshuahedlund
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.

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

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joshuahedlund
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.

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xbryanx
Raw data if you're interested:
[http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html#AVSL...](http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html#AVSLCFC)

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TomGullen
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.

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SpiderX
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.

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sigmaxipi
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...](http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html)

~~~
DanBC
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.

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Nate75Sanders
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?

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horv
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.

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gdubs
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.

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

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johansch
"Size 1.12 Gigapixels"

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

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achille2
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?

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

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

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xbryanx
Original data from the Russians:

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

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

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KVFinn
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.

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oofabz
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.

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K2h
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.

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mturmon
1 pixel = 1 km, according to the article.

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

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

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sp332
Blue Marble is a compilation from several different instruments. The new
"photograph" was taken with a single satellite all at once.

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mturmon
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...](http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2159.html)

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jeffpersonified
Where's 'Merica? This photo is biased.

