107
votes
Accepted
Which Apollo "mystery" was said to be finally solved by a better rendering engine?
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 ...
- 1,544
80
votes
Accepted
This image of the Space Shuttle is truly beautiful, but is it real?
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
...
- 1,694
55
votes
Accepted
Why are photos from Juno such low resolution?
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....
- 5,626
45
votes
This image of the Space Shuttle is truly beautiful, but is it real?
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, ...
- 963
29
votes
Accepted
Why was the imaging quality of the Voyager probes *much* better than the Pioneer probes despite being launched only 5 years later?
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of rapid technological development, so it's not actually surprising that the relatively new field of electronic imaging advanced so far in that five-year period. ...
- 167k
28
votes
Accepted
Is this really an image of the sun, or an "artist's conception"?
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 ...
- 126k
28
votes
Why was the imaging quality of the Voyager probes *much* better than the Pioneer probes despite being launched only 5 years later?
It is not only the progress in imaging over that period. Voyager was a more ambitious and expensive mission in general. The mass of Pioneer 11 was 259 kg, while that of Voyager was 825.5. That extra ...
- 10.2k
21
votes
Are there any photo(s) of International Space Station (ISS) captured from above its altitude?
Yes. Most craft, when docking with the ISS do a fly-around to survey the docking site. They can then frequently capture images of the ISS from the top view. Here is one from the Shuttle Atlantis taken ...
- 6,193
16
votes
Accepted
Why would thermal imaging be used to locate the Chandrayaan-2 lander?
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 ...
- 5,128
15
votes
Accepted
Why the thermal imaging of Mercury's surface requires a telescope on a jet flying through an eclipse?
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 ...
- 73.2k
14
votes
Accepted
Why are spy satellites in elliptical orbits?
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 ...
- 73.2k
13
votes
Accepted
Could a spy satellite image another satellite?
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:
&...
- 76.5k
13
votes
Is this really an image of the sun, or an "artist's conception"?
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 ...
- 149k
13
votes
Accepted
Stripe of high def imagery on Google Moon
The Moon part of Google Earth was published in 2009, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. So, it didn't have access to the wonderful photo imagery of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ...
- 21.3k
13
votes
This image of the Space Shuttle is truly beautiful, but is it real?
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 ...
- 1,834
12
votes
Help me understand these tweeted images of JWST moving through Orion!
I've made the picture and I try to answer the questions or clarify :
First picture (tweet) shows a cropped image of a usual stacked startrail image.
So the first image is a simple overlay of all ...
11
votes
Accepted
When can we (public) expect to see the first optical images of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft?
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 ...
- 5,178
11
votes
Accepted
Why would the James Webb Space Telescope need adaptive optics outside the atmosphere?
The primary and secondary mirrors on JWST can be adjusted:
Launching a mirror this large into space isn’t feasible. Instead, Webb engineers and scientists innovated a unique solution – building 18 ...
- 126k
11
votes
Accepted
Could an ISS astronaut photograph something like this 1km "Van Gogh" if they knew it was there?
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,...
- 781
11
votes
Accepted
Was an onboard camera during a rocket launch ever pointing to the side rather than down?
Most cameras on a rocket launch are there for a sound engineering reason.
They look down at the engines of the rocket, or up to the second stage, or out to the solar panels, or down inside the ...
10
votes
Accepted
Hovering Carbonite! Why do these satellite videos of Earth appear to be made from a geostationary location?
@BowlOfRed's comment nailed it.
I'd thought about making an optical flow version but time does not allow, so I've just used screenshots and imageio found here.
It looks like the spacecraft was ...
- 149k
9
votes
Accepted
Seeing stars in space
Aperture. The aperture diameter is too small and frame rate too great to capture dim distant sources of light. It's really that simple. Consider how the rocket's engine, its ejecta and the illuminated ...
- 76.5k
9
votes
Accepted
How did Skylab's electrographic ultraviolet camera work?
Similarly to night vision devices, the light sensitive part is the photocathode, which releases electrons when hit by photons. The electrons at the photocathode are accelerated by the -25 kilovolt ...
- 763
8
votes
Why is there no image of the Earth taken from the lunar surface during Apollo 12,15 and 16?
Why would there be? The Apollo mission goal was to examine the Moon, not take pretty pictures of Earth.
The seminal Earth image was taken by Apollo 8, this turned out to be an important image. But ...
- 126k
8
votes
Earth’s Orbit speed and apparent motion question
Firstly, it's going to take a big rocket to do this (larger than any rocket we have built so far btw).
We're travelling together with the Earth, so our speed relative to the Earth is 0. Thus, this isn'...
7
votes
How is satellite data used to find drug crops?
If you're not asking specifically about the near IR range photogrammetry but more in a general sense, then one obvious method of detection of covert drug plantations is simply human activity around ...
- 76.5k
7
votes
Accepted
How was this image of the sun taken and what does it show?
The composite image cannot be made from our standard jpegs as they are log-scaled to improve the contrast. You put the linearly-scaled data into the color channels of an sRBG image and then log scale ...
- 86
7
votes
Accepted
Any imagery from Shuttle Columbia's SILTS pod on the internet?
Wikipedia has one image that is attributed to the SILTS pod:
Source
Unfortunately, the metadata doesn't give any clue as to where it came from, or where more might be found.
I just happened to be ...
- 1,954
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible