NASA image of the day gallery

pickledegg

pickledegg

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I'll probably end up getting punished for being a space geek, but I thought I'd mention the NASA image of the day gallery, I get an email every day with you've guessed it, the image of the day.

464812main_image_1697_946-710.jpg


Here's todays:

Its Mercury as photographed my the MESSENGER spacecraft, pretty epic if you're into this kind of stuff.
 


Pretty cool but I had to double check you were't trying to pull a fast one with a pic of the moon. For some reason I thought Mercury was more like Venus.
 
Cracker said:
Maybe I'm retarded, but how do they get such detailed photos of things like this that are thousands of light years away?

For more info about what the photo is of: Carina Nebula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Click to expand...

That's a Hubble shot released to celebrate 20 years of operations. Not too unlike the Horse Head Nebula? released a very long time ago and one of the all time greatest shots I think.

I regularly frequent HubbleSite -- Out of the ordinary...out of this world. and peruse the press releases which show all the images made publicly available >> HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Entire Collection. Often there are extra large images there in the 30-60+ mb range that are of superb quality. You could easily take them and get them printed and framed.

Here's the page for this release...

HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery (04/22/2010) - Introduction

Click on "Release Images" up top to see there's actually about a dozen images released at the same time...

HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery (04/22/2010) - Release Images

and then you can see there's an image showing a wider view here...

HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery (04/22/2010) - Release Images

Click on "Highest-quality download options" and you can see there's a 19mb Tiff available for download at 2548 X 3528 pixels in size.

Enjoy!
 
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Cracker said:
Maybe I'm retarded, but how do they get such detailed photos of things like this that are thousands of light years away?

For more info about what the photo is of: Carina Nebula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Click to expand...

The pictures they get don't actually look like that. They use xrays/radio waves, spectrum stuff, etc...

Then someone else fills it in and colors it to match what we know about it. Takes quite a bit of work from what I remember reading.
 
Cracker said:
Maybe I'm retarded, but how do they get such detailed photos of things like this that are thousands of light years away?
Click to expand...

The original image isn't that clear or colorful. They start out in greyscale and then they have to zoom, color, etc. Here, I found a series of example pictures from one of the Cassini flyovers of Saturn's moons.

The original photo:
16hjh8p.png


Some zoom:
2vnju4m.png


Illustrators add Color to zoomed pic:
260386g.png


Some work in Photoshop or GIMP for finished product:
2itisyp.jpg


As you can see, it's a pretty involved process.
 
stmadeveloper said:
The pictures they get don't actually look like that. They use xrays/radio waves, spectrum stuff, etc...

Then someone else fills it in and colors it to match what we know about it. Takes quite a bit of work from what I remember reading.
Click to expand...

The pictures they get have the information you see in them, but they might be taken the way you describe and software would shift spectrums and colour them appropriately based on their properties. Often they are composites of many layers sandwiched together each with different data, but there's no filling in by hand unless the image specifically says "artist's interpretation" or similar.

This image was taken with this device for example...

Wide Field Camera 3 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and LoL at the above.
 
Fatbat said:
The pictures they get have the information you see in them, but they might be taken the way you describe and software would shift spectrums and colour them appropriately based on their properties. Often they are composites of many layers sandwiched together each with different data, but there's no filling in by hand unless the image specifically says "artist's interpretation" or similar.

This image was taken with this device for example...

Wide Field Camera 3 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and LoL at the above.
Click to expand...

I didn't mean to suggest that it was an artist drawing.... but you did explain it better than I did :)
 
they say the moon's craters are caused by meteor impacts. If the moon is in a tidal lock orbit with the earth. Having the same side always face the earth. Why does the side facing the earth also have impact craters? Why are they round and not oval from angled impacts? If the earth is slightly eliptical from the gravitational pull of the moon, why is the moon still round? If the shapes of south america and africa suggests that the continents once fit together during the Jurassic period (Pangaea). How do they explain two sides of a winding river or lake matching the other side?
river.jpg


These things bother me.
 
Cracker said:
Maybe I'm retarded, but how do they get such detailed photos of things like this that are thousands of light years away?
Click to expand...

They get clear pictures from millions and even billions of light years away!

Here's three reasons why that's possible,

1. The telescope is located in either ultra thin atmosphere(earth based observatories on mountains) or in space (Hubble Space Telescope, and soon it's successor, James Webb Telescope(which will provide even better images than Hubble!)).

2. The second reason is that interstellar/intergalactic space is as clean as it gets, a near perfect vacuum that contains less matter than anything we've ever produced on Earth.

3. The objects/phenomena being photographed are sometimes thousands of light years across themselves! The bigger/nearer the object, the more detail we are able to discern with our current technology/optics.

So the combination of these 3 criteria's produce the quality images we see today. As was already mentioned in this thread, the images WE see are post-processed to include colors based on spectrum analysis.

Spectrum analysis is when astronomer's spread the light in it's color constituents. They're able to tell what matter/compounds absorb which part of the spectrum(based on data tested here on Earth), and thus ultimately able to determine what composes the atmosphere of a body far away because it's missing those parts in the spectrum being analyzed.

Looove this stuff, if you got more questions just ask. :)
 
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