Earth-from-space photograph anomaly?

reply to post by Klassified


I don't really have a standpoint, and am willing to accept good argument.

I don't accept perspective as an explanation; however the use of zoom is yet to be determined.

Looking forward to some responses.

reply to post by MR1159


Ok, maybe i misunderstood, sorry, yes that is a bit weird that both pics taken at different distances in space would yeild the same size imagery of the Earth, either it was taken with a Zoom, or its a faked photo. Nice find

OP --

Do you have the "raw images" from the Galileo probe so we can see what size the Earth looks in that image?

This is not the raw image, because the descriptions I read about this image say that it was built from overlays of raw image photos from different wavelengths, and it has been brightened to show contrast. That makes it sound as if this is a special image released to the media, which I suppose means that it could have also been cropped and enlarged from those raw images.

Or, as others have pointed out, perhaps Galileo uses a different lens with a different zoom than the Apollo picture.

Those are the first things that immediately crossed my mind.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


I read that the Voyager image (which has been incorrectly attributed to the Earth/moon conjunction pic in my post) was brightened and/or re-assembled because of the relative brightness of the objects and lack of contrast. If you look at that image on planetary.org, you can see it is a very poor image.

But this is not the image I have reproduced in the post. I have not read about a raw image being available for the Galileo pic that I reproduced. I would like to see it myself.

Thanks for posting.

Originally posted by MR1159
...But this is not the image I have reproduced in the post. I have not read about a raw image being available for the Galileo pic that I reproduced. I would like to see it myself.

Link here:
photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov...

It's fairly hard to say anything without the actual raw images for both and the full details for both cameras (zoom, resolution, etc). Currently there's too many variables that are unknown to assert that the Earth is the same size in both images. Yes, it is the same apparrent size, but either image the Earth was taken from here could have just been resized for any number of reasons.

To me the image looks wrong... OP said something about how big the earth would look if you were stood on the moon in the smaller pic, but what if you ware standing on the earth, how big would the moon look. It may be down to perspective of the smaller image. i.e. the moon is a bit closer to the camera than the earth, and so looks closer to the earth, and bigger than it should be. This does not explain the fact of the distances the photos were taken over though, but to be fair, this could just be that the two images are different scale, or on is zoomed in and one is not... others have said similar things i think...

something is definitely wrong.

below is the REAL scale image from wikipedia.
earth should look bigger, either one was doctored image.

maybe we could just put this jpeg scale into 3D software and put the camera on moon and see what size of earth we could get from there.

Originally posted by requireduser
something is definitely wrong.

below is the REAL scale image from wikipedia.
earth should look bigger, either one was doctored image.

I'm not sure how the image in your post is meaningful.

In the OP's picture from the Galileo spacecraft, the Moon is closer to the spacecraft that the Earth is, hence the reason that the Moon looks bigger than it should.

reply to post by MR1159


I am surprised that no one has given you the answer yet.

The two images cannot be compared because the distances between the observation point and each celestial body for the "at the moon image" and "from Galileo image" are completely unrelated. The rules of similar triangles only work when one case differs by only a scale factor from the other and this condition is clearly not met.

Best regards,
Z

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People

Originally posted by requireduser
something is definitely wrong.

below is the REAL scale image from wikipedia.
earth should look bigger, either one was doctored image.

I'm not sure how the image in your post is meaningful.

In the OP's picture from the Galileo spacecraft, the Moon is closer to the spacecraft that the Earth is, hence the reason that the Moon looks bigger than it should.

the problem is the size of earth,
is the earth sizes like that when you look from moon?

since earth is larger than moon,
and we know how the moon size as we view it daily from earth, so when we view earth from moon, it should be obviously larger than the size of moon we view from earth.

Originally posted by MR1159

The size of the Earth in each picture is almost identical - yet one was taken from ~240,000 miles, and the other from 3.9 million miles.

What's going on? I can't see how this could be an illusion. Are one or more of these photo's doctored?

Erm, a zoom lens? I know were not supposed to post one liners but unfortunately the answer is that short but at least I have waffled over two lines

Originally posted by chaakin
I've noticed that the size of the earth in every picture is EXTREMELY SMALL!! I mean, the earth is way bigger than the moon, so a picture of Earth from the Moon should make the earth about 3-5 times larger than what the moon looks like here on earth.... FAKED IMAGERY!

Under the same circumstances, the size of the Earth seen from the Moon must be bigger than the Moon seen from Earth, so if you go to the Moon and look at Earth you will see it bigger than the Moon we see from Earth (and that must be a great view!).

But if you use cameras, you are limited to the camera's limitations, that's why professional photographers at sports events, for example, do not use their cell phones to take photos.

Here is my take... They used a very high resolution camera and blew it up.

For example... take your arm and stretch it as far out as you can, then take a picture of your hand with, say, your phone (not a high resolution piece of equipment, but you'll see where I'm going with this).

NEXT, take a picture of your hand as close to the camera as you can get it without leaving the camera frame.

Finally, take your first photo and blow it up to a larger size (with a low-resolution image, it will appear blurry and pixelated) and it will appear to be the same size as your close-up image when viewed side by side. With higher resolution, it will not appear blurry or pixelated when blown up.

Hope this helps!

reply to post by MR1159


I would think that the camera on Galileo is much more sophisticated than the one the astronaut used to take the picture from the surface of the moon. I'm sure the astronaut's camera was used with little to no zoom and the Galileo camera used an incredible amount of zoom. There is no conspiracy here.

The cameras are for different mission specs, which the OP has given us zero information on. How is it I see photos of the moon that look tiny and others where it looks huge. Hate to say but this is an idiotic thread and posture.

How about seeing how much of each image was cropped. How about looking up the magnification zoom, one would thing a space probe would have high magnification factors you wouldn't want standing on the moon. This is about all that is worth my time to comment on. Just a silly notion of a thread idea, backed with ZERO data, (except relative distance from earth).

Sorry is this sound harsh or insulting, but you should be offended.

Originally posted by Thunderheart
sneaky way to promote your website you could have just uploaded the picture to ATS.
mods, do your worse.

Can you tell me where he posted the link to his website? The only URL that I can see is planet.org and I don't think that he owns that website.

As for the pics, I think they used different zoom.

There are two possibilities I can think of that would account for the phenomenon:

1. Focal Length of the cameras used can vary the comparative size of objects (as has been mentioned in other posts) such as in this image:
en.wikipedia.org...:Focal_length.jpg

2. A situation similar to the Moon Optical Illusion but from the moon looking at Earth as compared to an image taken from space:
www.moillusions.com...

Most likely it is a combination of factors from image editing to the cameras used.

Cheers

reply to post by Thunderheart/Kryties


Narc. Let the mod's do it.