100
NVIDIA rendered Aldrin descending to the surface and discovered that, just as the conspiracies claimed, it couldn't be reproduced with direct light from the sun as the sole light source. Of course, as in photos on Earth, indirect light (reflected, scattered...) is an important source of scene illumination and must be taken into account.
After adding the ...
81
This image is very similar to the following image
https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-130/html/iss022e062672.html
with the following description
STS-130 Shuttle Mission Imagery
ISS022-E-062672 (9 Feb. 2010)
Though astronauts and cosmonauts often encounter striking scenes of Earth's limb, this very unique image, part of a ...
55
Short answer: JunoCam is not a scientific instrument; It was put onboard solely to get some neat pictures. It is not necessary for the scientific mission, and is mostly there just for public interest. You can interact with JunoCam by voting on what it takes pictures of.
Long answer: There are several reasons which combine to result in Juno only being ...
45
A reverse image search (once you tell Google you're looking for the space shuttle, not base jump) brings you to the picture on Getty Images, which states:
Space shuttle above Earth's atmosphere, composite image
(emphasis mine).
So it's probably composed of one of the pictures linked to by OON and some other picture of the moon. Or that part could be ...
31
The Dawn spacecraft is carrying 3 electromagnetic instruments; the Framing Camera (FC), the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRND), and the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). Your question is presumably about colour images in the visual spectrum and not false-color images of wavelengths not visible to humans, so let's focus on the Framing ...
28
You can find the image on Flickr.
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic ...
26
Spacecraft that take pictures take them similar to a digital camera. However, the camera is very far away. Similar to downloading a movie off of a website so you can watch it on your local device, it takes time to transmit those images. However, because the distance is so far away, it can take a lot of time to download the images.
The images reside on a ...
25
Organic Marble is correct in the comment, New Horizons is now busy with Departure Phase (DP2 from Aug 5-Oct 22) science and transmitting plasma and dust data, and no additional images will be transmitted until September 14 when Science Data Playback phase starts. All images from New Horizons Press Conferences Materials:
Image sources: (1): Alan Stern, New ...
23
New Horizons pans during shots to eliminate motion smear. See this related question.
The Voyager mission proved that this was possible:
Between Voyager 2’s encounter with Saturn in 1981 and Uranus in 1986, controllers developed a technique called “image motion compensation.” This involved moving the scan platform at slow rates, which was found to be ...
23
I'm afraid it would be extremely difficult - simply the number of photons reflected off a planet surface and reaching Earth (and the telescope lens, however big) within timeframe for a solid photo is too small to create any meaningful image.
Planets are not stationary; they orbit their stars, and that means long-exposure photo will show them as a trails. Of ...
20
It's not currently possible to get the details of a planet from a distance like a light year or more. Furthermore the projects mentioned below do not aim to get good images of the surface, but only to detect exoplanets, and do basic measurements. The reason is that getting detailed pictures of the surface is beyond current technology capability and research.
...
19
(10 year old version)
The pictures are sent by radio, and the radio signals travel at the speed of light. Although the speed of light is very fast, it is not unlimited, and space probes can be very far away. So the time that elapses is simply the time it takes for the radio waves to travel at the speed of light over the very long distances between the ...
16
EPIC (PDF) is a Cassegrain type reflector telescope so there's the fixed hyperbolic secondary mirror in the middle of the telescopes light path / focal plane. While that could be removed during post-processing and combining multiple exposures focusing at slightly different angles of the telescope itself (or shifting of the sensor on the focal plane, depends ...
16
It was not a thermal image at all.
It is an optical image that has been captured by Orbiter of the lander
spot and not thermal image as reported by others media houses. OHRC is
same like our human eye. Since it consists of only one spectral band
in visible region, so Image will be of gray scale, Not color image.
https://twitter.com/Madrassan_Pinky/...
14
Your guess is correct. To quote NASA's page,
The mosaics each consist of multiple narrow-angle camera (NAC) images with data from the wide-angle camera used to fill in areas where NAC data was not available.
13
If you mean if New Horizons' data return could produce a global high-resolution map of Pluto's surface, then no, and here's why:
Pluto at New Horizons approach:
New Horizons Ground Track on Pluto:
Source of both images is Alan Stern's (New Horizons PI) presentation (PDF) to OPAG Meeting in July 23, 2014.
As you can see, on New Horizons' close approach, ...
13
You don't have to expect of the intelligence community to divulge classified information to see if this is possible, it has been done before by civilian satellites:
&...
13
I'm posting these images as a supplement @Hobbes's accepted answer and @TildalWave's comments (which includes links to these images). I started reading some of those links. The gallery is a good starting place but there are different tabs to check out.
The values 171 and 304 represent the central wavelengths used, in Angstrom units. Our visible spectrum is ...
13
Some further information on the manipulation or possible genuine situation can be had by analyzing the perspective in the image.
I measured the length of the orbiter as 49 pixels and the diameter of moon as 251 pixels in the image. Because the apparent size of the moon is approximately 0.5 degrees when camera is anywhere close to earth, we can calculate ...
12
Yes. Here is the first image of an extrasolar planet taken from 2005: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050510.html.
12
Radio waves are such an abstract concept that it might be useful to explain to a child using an analogy of concrete objects. In a real way, picture information contained in a radio transmission could just as well be a string of baseballs thrown at high velocity, where the patterns or aiming of the throws enable reconstructing the picture at the other end. If ...
11
It was displayed publicly yesterday! At a Karman lecture held by Mr. Blaine Baggett, Director, Office of Communication and Education, JPL. It might not be archived and available to download right now, but soon it will. And I'm sorry for being a spoiler, but it is in the last few minutes of his show. Even the crayons used to draw it are preserved.
(I might ...
11
A correct analogy would be:
There is an image at some location.
Someone is here and talks to someone else at a distance.
The first person announces the color of each pixel, one by one.
The second person, who hears the first one, draws each pixel according to the announcements.
The sound of the voice takes time to travel, the further, the longer (this can be ...
11
I like @PearsonArtPhoto's answer, though the considerations about exposure time may not be correct. I was looking for something more visual.
The website states an area of 0,53m² of the Van Gogh image, and since the original is 92.1 × 73.7 cm², the large version must be about 0.817km wide.
During his year in space, Scott Kelly took tons of photos, one of ...
11
There's an interesting Planetary Society article about this: What to expect from Junocam
We won't be able to see spectacular views of Jupiter's belts and zones from Jupiter orbit until the very end of August, and it'll be November before we'll see automated release of high-resolution raw images.
August 27 is expected to be a day when photography takes ...
11
This is just an educated guess; I'm not connected with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or any related agency.
Europe is in the northern hemisphere, as is the Middle East and all of mainland Asia. Those are the primary targets of the United State's satellite spying efforts. What about the Southern Hemisphere? It's mostly water (not a threat), a ...
10
This has been done for the Moon, Mars and Mercury.
The Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter mission aims to map the moon. It has two narrow-angle cameras which make black-and-white images of the surface, capturing images with resolutions down to 1 meter (about 3.3 feet). This has yielded tons of nice images, including the Apollo landing sites and many other probes.
...
10
I really can't add much to the already excellent answers but as seen as this is for a 10 year old the following picture from wikipedia may help explain the concept. It shows a pulse of light travelling at the finite speed mentioned in the other answers.
10
Why not a satellite-based telescope to observe Mercury in the thermal infrared?
Space-borne satellites that are designed to look at the Sun (e.g., SOHO) aren't instrumented to look in the thermal infrared, while satellite-based telescopes that are instrumented to look in the thermal infrared in general don't point anywhere close to the Sun.
One issue with ...
10
It's the diffuse reflection of sunlight on the oceans. If you look closely, you will see they don't occur over land - although your brain may fill in and make it look like they do until you look closely - the stripe on the east side of South America is a good example of that.
The stripes follow the ground track of the satellite's orbit; as the spacecraft ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
