Earth-from-space photograph anomaly?

The great thing about modern technology and photography is that we have this thing called zoom...you know...where you can make something look bigger than it is...from different distances you can even make things the same size by zooming it 16.25 times greater than other times for example.

Nothing to see here.

who knows whats real anymore







www.aulis.com...

There's nothing in this image that can be used to do any reasonable comparison of scale.

Not only would the field of view (no even zoom, just a wider angle) change the size of an object, resolution also plays a big factor.

If you take a picture, and then another from the exact same spot but at half the resolution, when viewed on a computer the objects in the latter photo will be half the size as the larger resolution picture.

Did they resize the earth? Possibly, but there's no way to tell without knowing significantly more details about the photos.

Originally posted by jazzguy
who knows whats real anymore

edit on 21-9-2011 by jazzguy because: (no reason given)

www.aulis.com...

edit on 21-9-2011 by jazzguy because: (no reason given)

Yup, definitely proof that they pasted the earth into that photo... or that they just selected a rectangle around the earth and changed the contrast to make it more visible.

What Earth would look like next to the moon from Earth point-of-view. Not 100% accurate, but close. Also, LOL.

Originally posted by icepack
different lenses and zoom ?

Exactly. Different focal lengths will have this affect. A Wide angle will make distant objects appear small, a telephoto will make them large.

reply to post by Illustronic


Woohoo - you go, girl.

Why don't you get your lazy backside over to the original images, for which I provided a link. Or just stay where you are and do some more flaming.

reply to post by coldkidc


OK, dude, and all the other similar posters.

I never postulated a conspiracy theory.

Secondly, why would scientists aim a camera back at Earth from millions of miles away only to zoom in so it looks just as close as the distance from the moon. What's the point of that?

The original photographs are at planetary.org. If anybody were really interested, they'd go have a look. There you will see original, un-zoomed, uncropped images. If we had camera and lens data it would be really helpful, but I have seen none.

So far I've only seen one post with a modicum of thought behind it. All the rest are either well-meaning guessers; or people out to have a wise-crack.

I'll give it another day and see if there is anything worth considering...

..One was taken from a much smaller hand held camera on the moon correct? The other would have been higher powered telescopic..

Originally posted by MR1159
The original photographs are at planetary.org.

Not really, the image below is an original image from Galileo (it's possible that this was one of the photos used to make the colour version).



As the other photo was taken with a film camera, the size of the image depends on how it was scanned. I have on my computer a 4400 x 4600 pixels version of the "Earth rise" photo.

Originally posted by MR1159
reply to post by coldkidc

 

Secondly, why would scientists aim a camera back at Earth from millions of miles away only to zoom in so it looks just as close as the distance from the moon. What's the point of that?

Uhhh... so you can see what they are photographing? Maybe the newer photo is a forgery and the Earth rise photo is the real deal

Originally posted by coldkidc
The great thing about modern technology and photography is that we have this thing called zoom...you know...where you can make something look bigger than it is...from different distances you can even make things the same size by zooming it 16.25 times greater than other times for example.

Nothing to see here.

They have a 6-year trip before any real scientific equipment begins it's service while traveling and it is customary to periodically fire up the power sources and equipment along the way for testing and calibrations. With all of that idle time why not use some of the equipment to add to the mission, its not like every day you have a camera in space a few million miles away to use. Its also not a camera with film, so you won't expire your resources with what sounds like from you, wasted, frivolous, or horsing around.

It's part of the lengthy mission to monitor the health of the equipment operational responses, and if a problem is detected the mission grows to trying to solve that problem also. It's pretty fascinating that mission control could possibly solve a problem that might occur millions of miles away with not a single hand on board, but it has happened.

reply to post by MR1159


Mate, you might not like the answers, but there is experience behind some of them.

Look. When you use diferent focal lengths it will have a changing effect on perspective, especialy far off objects. I can also change the apparent size of distant object by varying the apperture size in relation to my distance from the foreground objects, rendering them either blurred or sharply focussed as I prefer, all depending on how I choose to set up the camera.

Take the picture of the Earth rise from the moon. In order to get a ipcture like that there would have had to be a very small apperture in order to acheve both foreground and infinity focusing. I don't know what lenses they used. With the amount of foreground in the frame this must have been a reasonably wide angle lense which makes sence. Depth of feild increases as A) The focal length decreases and B) the aperture reduces in size. So we can be sure by the fact that the foreground AND the Earth (effectively infinity) are both in focus that both of those conditions must be true.

So the camera and lense are both set in such a way that the very large Earth will appear smaller because of the wide angle and small apperture combination. Large foreground, small but well focused background.

If you are looking back into the depths of space with a zoom lense so as to capture the moon and the Earth in a single shot, you won't get this perpspective shift. You will get pretty much what that photo shows.

These are the rules of photography. It has been a hobby of mine for 20 years, and I know a lot about it. I can go in to further detail of how all this fits together if you wish. But I am sure this explains your question well enough. If you have a access to a decent camer, I will even instruct you on how to set it up to demonstrate this effect.

Be Happy