Far side of the moon revealed in amazing mosaic of orbiter images!

Exactly where do people see 'strikes going outward'? The raised edges of impact creators? Point out a single Olympus Mons anywhere. Besides the moon wasn't always dead, it had to be formed sometime, 4.5 billion years is a long time and stuff there isn't going anywhere. The moon still has a crust, mantel, and core, it just cools faster. Look at thermal pictures of the moon, it doesn't have an even temperature.

It's the flat grayscale image that makes some here think the far side is smother than the near side because you cant see the color seas. The far side is much bumpier than the near side, this is evenly lit, don't people read the threads before they spew out crap! It's only 3 pages long! 3 pages of amazing comments, the education system surely must be failing these days.

Originally posted by macman
reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

 

One side has strikes going inward. the other side has strikes coming outward.

Is something trying to get out?

Still not buying any of it.

I misunderstood you..
...I thought you were asking why one side is more cratered than the other.

You seem to instead be saying that the features on the near side are convex (sticking out like domes). However, I don't see what you are seeing. Those features all look like normal craters to me.

Can you give me a specific example (perhaps a picture with arrows or circles) of something "coming outward'.

Originally posted by ReaPErofSIN
Yes the truth is hard for some. But do as you please because I don't feed off the TPTB teets like you robots. Think outside of the box. Not what government paid scientist write in your untruthful books. I'm sure most of you spent your young years in a public school listening to the crap the NEA gives to the masses. Oh but who is a major contributor to the NEA? Your very own Rockafellas. So take what you want robot. My knowledge comes from the archives on the astral plane. The true knowledge of how everything came to be. But instead be dormant and hide for your ever so powerful government who will save you slave.

You can think outside the box but some things belong outside the box.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Yes I understand this but I myself can barely call that spinning or just for you I will say it looks like the slowest spinning planetary body we know of in this vast universe....once again...hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Originally posted by canadiancatfoodforcrocadi
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

Yes I understand this but I myself can barely call that spinning or just for you I will say it looks like the slowest spinning planetary body we know of in this vast universe....once again...hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Iapetus (a moon of Saturn) takes 79 days to rotate once...and (not coincidentally) 79 days to orbit around Saturn once. Another Moon of Saturn, Titan, rotates more quickly than our moon, taking about 15 days to rotate once. Jupiter's Moon Callisto takes about 17 days.

If you watched Earth's Moon orbit around the Sun for a year, and ignored that the Earth was even there, you would see the Moon rotate approximately 13 times during that year. So it does indeed rotate, once every 27.3 days.

Venus spins even more slowly than any of those moons. Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate (spin on its axis) once. So a Venus "day" is 243 Earth days long. A Venus year is only 225 Earth days long, so a Venus "day" is longer than its year...

...By the way, (I say a Venus "day" is 243 earth days in quotes because it revolves around the Sun while it spins, you can't say that its "daylight" and "nighttime" are each half of 243 Earth Days).

have you guys noticed look carefully at the image......now you all see the line going through the middle from the stiching process.... but have you noticed that the right side of the image is different from the left....

THE LEFT SIDE HAS CRATERS....THE RIGHT SIDE HAS THE SAME 'CRATERS' BUT THEY SEEM TO BE STICKING OUTWARD AS IF THEY ARE MOUNTAINS....WEIRD...AND FAKE...I REKON 40% IS MISSING

reply to post by thePharaoh


OH!!! I see what you & macman are talking about! Once you broke it down to left-right I finally saw what was going on.

I knew, in general, that macman was seeing an optical illusion based on a known phenomenon, but I didn't know why he was getting it in the OP image. Here, look at this picture:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/c235ac08b605.gif[/atsimg]
Figure 1.

Your brain is interpreting these as a bunch of bumps and indents, but which are which?

Instinctively, our mind assumes that the light is coming from above (i.e. sunlight), so when we see light on the top and shadows on the bottom, our brain interprets this as convex, i.e. bulging toward us. If the upper part of the curve is in shadow, and the lower part is lit, we see that as concave, like looking into a bowl.

When we look at an actual object, our depth perception usually sorts this out quickly. Unfortunately, our brains never evolved to cope with 2-dimensional photographs of 3-dimensional objects. Losing the vital cues from parallax & depth perception means that the brain has to rely on the lighting to determine concave & convex.

I first heard about this when I read an article about how National Geographic makes airbrush maps. When they made a map of Mt. Everest, they had to show it sun-lit from the north (northwest, actually) even though the sun never shines on it from that direction. If they had painted it with the sunlight coming from the south - which it does, in real life (I've seen it. Put it on your "bucket list". Seriously. ) - that would have been confusing to the eye.

Anyway, in the illusion picture, above, if the artist had put the light straight above, then the individual objects would resolve pretty easily (Pardon the 4AM cut & paste, but for reasons that will soon be obvious, I rearrainged them so that the indents appear at the top, and the bumps appear at the bottom.):

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/17ac61f3b3ed.gif[/atsimg]
Figure 2.

Instead, the artist has the light coming in from an angle, so its ambiguous. It gets even more confusing if you have the light coming in from the side:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/c15a4285c192.gif[/atsimg]
Figure 3.

Which are the mounds, and which are the craters? The more you stare at it, the more they switch back and forth!

Well, it turns out that the folks at Arizona State who put this mosaic together accidentally created the same illusion. Remember that one of their objectives was to create the mosaic from images taken with oblique lighting so that the shadows would make the features easier to see. For consistency's sake, they mostly used images that had the sunlight coming in from the west, so that for every crater, the shadowed part of the inner rim would be on the left, and the lighted part of the inner rim would be on the right. So far, so good...

However, apparently they did not have imagery of the entire moon with that lighting angle. If you look at each of the six mosaics linked at the bottom of this page, you see that one-quarter of the globe - from longitude 180 to 270 - is imaged with sunlight from the east, so that the light/shadow pattern on the crater rims is reversed.

When you zoom in on the centerline of the OP's 180-longitude mosaic, you can see that every crater on the left is lit from the left and every crater on the right is lit from the right, just like in figure 3 above, which had the most visual confusion!

So, to macman & thePharoah and others: Yes, all of the craters are, in fact, bowl-shaped depressions, A trick of the lighting caused by the way the mosaic was put together caused an optical illusion to make them look convex.

I think that is just so cool!

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/a481dd941876.jpg[/atsimg]

The left side is from Google Earth. I did my best to aproximate the exact same angle as image 2 from Nasa. Image 3 is the Nasa image with a gaussian blur on it to make it more like the Google Earth image to "help find things".

By cutting the google Earth image along the dashed lines one can clearly pull the seam together using the distort function.

Notice the differences in proximity of the main features circled in red. If the area was removed the images would all be similar, just more detail with Nasa.

Notice in Image 2 the unnatural V formations, I can count at least three. This is caused by pulling (using distort) the seam shut. You can also see the bottom dark spots are pulled higher, especially between images 1 and 3. The lower center dark crater that looks like an arrow in 2 and 3 clearly is not in 1.

I have over 15 years photoshop experience, this ones obvious.

bigger image here


It is to bad Google earth doesn't have more detail.

reply to post by thePharaoh

Yeah -- as Saint Expurey said, the image is a mosaic of thousands of images -- each taken at different times, so each with the sunlight coming from different angles.

But it seems there is a method of consistency as to the sun angle on each side of the Moon in this mosaic image. It seems to me that for the left side of the Moon, NASA used pictures that were sunlit from the left. For the right side, NASA used mostly images that were sunlit from the right.

I think NASA did this because it seems to be the best sun angle to see the craters with the best definition -- i.e., the craters seem to look best when the inside rim of each crater has a shadow that is on the rim away from you. So, of course, for the shadow to be always on the inside rim away from the observer, the sunlight would need to be coming from different sides for each hemisphere.

In addition to the consistent sun angles, this is also an orthographic projection, so it is going to look different than it would to a photograph or naked-eye view of the moon.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/22eb02b128ee.jpg[/atsimg]

This is am example of how easy it is to fake the moon.

Really odd indeed. It doesn't seem to mesh up with:



But in further observation, isn't it really strange that all them craters have shallow flat bottoms? Isn't the moon kinda soft on the outside? With craters that large, wouldn't the impact depth be deeper?

Originally posted by OuttaTime
Really odd indeed. It doesn't seem to mesh up with:



But in further observation, isn't it really strange that all them craters have shallow flat bottoms? Isn't the moon kinda soft on the outside? With craters that large, wouldn't the impact depth be deeper?

Actually, the larger the impact, the smaller the ratio of a crater's depth to its diameter. That's because a large portion of the material excavated in the impact falls back down in the crater, like a drop of water.

Originally posted by OuttaTime
Really odd indeed. It doesn't seem to mesh up with:


...

That image you linked is from the Luna 3 spacecraft and was taken October 7, 1959. Not all of that image is of the far side; some of the near side is also visible in that image.

The Moon phase for that date (as seen from Earth) was a waxing crescent -- about 1/2 of the way to the "1st Quarter" phase. Therefore, the half of the Moon that was lit by the Sun on that day included a portion of the near side facing the Earth. That means a good chuck (maybe 25%?) of the far side of the Moon on that day would be in the dark, and would not show up if they tried to photograph it.

Some of those dark patches in the lower left quadrant in your image are mare (seas) that can partially be seen from Earth (Mare Smythii and Mare Marginis), and are technically on the near side, albeit on the edge of the near side. To give you a point of reference, that small dark patch in the upper right quadrant in the image you linked is Mare Moscoviense (which is on the far side). In the OP's image back on the 1st page of this thread, Mare Moscoviense can be seen in the upper left quadrant.

To take a picture while the entire far side in daylight, the picture would need to be taken when the whole near side is totally dark, which would be the "New Moon" phase as seen from Earth.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Yeah, it actually matches up pretty good to the orthographic view centered on 120 degrees longitude here:



Luna 3's view is centered above the equator, so it's getting more of the north pole than we see in the LROC mosaic. But the maria line up pretty well.

reply to post by nataylor


Nice job .
Your overlay clarifies my post pretty well. Thank you

Its the Deathstar from star wars watch out!!!

Originally posted by lektrofellon
reply to post by Justaposter

 

No problem,thanks,me too,i wonder why it has taken them so long!

There has been pictures of the far side of the moon for quite some time...... I guess you just missed it.

Click here for pics

Still, thanks for sharing. Love the latest picture.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Just giving you a star was just not enough -- you needed some written kudos and a few of these for that awesome explanation!!!

Originally posted by gimme_some_truth

Originally posted by lektrofellon
No problem,thanks,me too,i wonder why it has taken them so long!

There has been pictures of the far side of the moon for quite some time...... I guess you just missed it.

Indeed.

There have been pictures of the far side of the Moon (in varying resolution/quality) since 1959. Before these LRO pictures were released, there were some pretty good medium-resolution images from the Clementine spacecraft released back in the early-to-mid 1990s.

Here are some links to Clementine images (although they aren't as hi-res as these new LRO images):
Clementine Whole-Moon Images
Clementine Image Browser

By the way, even the LRO images of the far side shown in the OP are not "brand new". The mosaic itself may be new, but many of the images in that mosaic have been publicly available for a few months now.