My God! It's Full Of Stars!

reply to post by Phage


From the image you kindly posted, there are several bright candidate stars that, when all things are considered, ought to have shown up in the MSL image (IMO).

Things to consider would indeed be the relative brighthness of Earth compared against the next brightest source at meg 2.0, but looking at the MSL image, Earth is imaged about midway from the horizon to the top edge of the image.

This midway point is significantly brighter than the top quarter of the image, due to the scattered sunlight over and below the Martian horizon, Earth (and Lunar), even though it is relatively bright, is still the only light source seen despite being in the twilight area, in partial weak light...the darker area at the top of the image would even out the difference in brightness between the Earth / Lunar and the next brightest light source / star at 2.0...wouldn't it?

If i go outside at dusk (if we ever get an end to the clouds over here) and look across to the horizon, i may well see Venus (when its visible) clearly against the scattered light of the setting Sun...but if i look up to the darker portion of the sky, i will see many stars, even though they are not as bright as Venus is in comparison, they'll be brighter against the darker area of the sky.

This is what i had imagined would be the case here with the MSL image.

MysterX
reply to post by funbox

 

Thank you funbox...what you've posted is exactly what i had expected to see in the image in this OP.

Lots and lots of lovely stars.

They must have removed them...i wish they hadn't done and instead just circled Earth to show us in all our cosmic glory.

edit on 8-2-2014 by MysterX because: (no reason given)

from a design point of view the only two reasons I can think off is to highlight the earth and moon more (easier viewing) , or maybe to give a feel to the picture , to illustrate the vast distance maybe/ or the not to far approach feeling, there's all sort of phycology used when presenting pictures, lets say that there was only a few brighter stars about in the picture, like the ones phage illustrated, maybe they just didn't add anything to the pic ,no vast milkytway behind the earth , so ,' ahh screw it scrub out the distractions ,this is done all the time for news sites and papers, or the show page.. in this instance if they did , its no big deal, as long as the raws are untouched... o yeah where are they ?

almost forgot the second reason ,it was full of ufos

funbox

reply to post by MysterX

Things to consider would indeed be the relative brighthness of Earth compared against the next brightest source at meg 2.0, but looking at the MSL image, Earth is imaged about midway from the horizon to the top edge of the image

The Stellarium shot I posted has a field of view of about 70º x 50º.

It turns out that the left mastcam has a field of view of 18º x 15º. That's not a very large field of view. Hold your fist, thumb up, at arm's length and the distance from top to bottom is about 10º. Top to bottom, the image from MSL is covers only one and a half fists.

www.lpi.usra.edu...

There is an ancient legend that is told amongst the thread-makers of Terra: "When you have been on the forums long enough to see Bowman's Proclamation as a thread title three times? It's time to go.

"My God, its full of stars!"

oh my God—I'm full of stars!

My God! It's Full Of Stars!

reply to post by Bybyots


Or in a very beautiful woman's fruit cellar:

"My Goddess, it's full of jars!"

reply to post by Aleister


Or in Gimli's dresser, "My God! It's full of bars!"



P.S. We are going to catch it for this; you know that, right?

Bybyots
reply to post by Aleister

 

Or in Gimli's dresser, "My God! It's full of bars!"

P.S. We are going to catch it for this; you know that, right?

Maybe not. On threads about Mars finds (and this thread seems to have come down to a discovery about there being no stars in Mars' sky to yes, stars probably exist in the Martian sky), which are really real few and far between, the tendency is to let people play a little while keeping on topic in a wider arc than usual. So they've become a lot of fun, and the mods have let them become a little more fun than usually allowed on threads, because of the subject matter. The new viral Mars thread, Egyptian pharaoh head (just rocks..both how the thread has gone viral and the main object itself - rocks now being surrounded by rock temples and ancient rock libraries and rock writing on its rock headdress), is turning into good fun, while at the same time - and this is the key part of the fun - keeping on topic and advancing the thread. Which hopefully this post does.

reply to post by Bybyots


2001 and 2010 are probably among the most influential films i've ever watched.

Can't help the odd Bowman moment now and then.

Now you've got me mumbling a HAL9000 rendition of Daisy, Daisy in ever decreasing keys, i hope you're happy, it'll be with me for hours!

Here's a picture taken from Earth of the Moon and Venus. AND OH MY GOD THERE ARE NO STARS!!!!



It's all down to exposure. As has been pointed out time and time and time again whenever non photographers question photos of stars or the Moon etc. You need a long exposure to capture distant stars, but that means over exposure of closer, brighter objects like planets or the Moon. So you adjust the exposure according to what it is you are photographing. Maybe a bit of background research before making yourself look silly next time? Girls go for clever guys, not ignorant ones

AndyMayhew

Girls go for clever guys, not ignorant ones

edit on 8-2-2014 by AndyMayhew because: (no reason given)

Nice picture, but at the end there, maybe not quite accurate. Girls go for guys who try to get the answer, who can admit they don't know the answer, and ask when they are interested in something.

Another thing I think we should consider is that the camera is the same one which takes daily surface shots. That means that the resolution is the same too. Now... why cant we get that resolution on surface shots?

I am not an expert in this, but they say nothing of stacking multiple images, (apart from the waste of time and money it would take to download them) so we have to assume that the picture is taken using a longer exposure. In some photos from Earth, the stars are streaked as the earth rotates, so wouldn't Mars rotate as well producing similar streaks too?

I believe we have seen images of the moons (Phobos and Deimos) in rover pictures. (I seem to remember this somewhere) Maybe we could compare the sizes and distances and come up with a comparison. We know the distance from Earth-Mars, if we can find the image of a Mars moon, we know the size of it and how large it is too.

from this wikipedia page

If viewed from the surface of Mars near its equator, full Phobos looks about one third as big as the Earth's full moon from Earth.

Mars Moons link 1
Mars Moons link 2

It doesn't seem likely to me that there is any sort of coverup.

Assuming no stars could be seen, surely NASA would possess the technology to generate fake stars? And why would there be a conspiracy about other stars in the first place?

Phage
Here's the view that Stellarium provides. It gives Earth a magnitude of -1.1. I don't know the field of view of the image from Mars but there aren't many bright star in it. The brightest star in this Stellarium view is Alpha Aries at magnitude 2.0. Earth is more than twice as bright as that star.

Actually, the astronomical magnitude scale is logarithmic and has each step being ~2.51 times brighter than the next step (5 magnitudes equals 100 times the brightness).

This means that Earth, at -1.1 is 16 times brighter than 2nd magnitude Alpha Aries - if it's even in the field of view!

So, seeing fainter stars in this image? Forget about it!

reply to post by Saint Exupery

Doh!
You're right. I skipped the negative value and used +1 for Earth.
But I'm not sure we can forget about magnitude 2 stars. The Moon is indicated to appear at magnitude 2.

qmantoo
In some photos from Earth, the stars are streaked as the earth rotates, so wouldn't Mars rotate as well producing similar streaks too?

Stars in long exposures from Mastcam right (the telescopic one) do indeed produce streaks, I have seen them in the images. Mastcam left has a wider field of view, and when the exposure is not that long (for example like in this particular panorama), the streaks are unnoticeable.

Here's a couple of Curiosity's pictures of Jupiter:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...
Jupiter is the bright blob that has a slight vertical streak. Most of other dots is digital noise, but if you flick between the two images, you can find some faint vertical streaks that move from shot to shot like Jupiter. Those are stars.

Here's the processed image identifying the stars and even Jupiter's moons:

So, Curiosity can certainly capture stars, but it takes some work to isolate them from the camera noise, and even then it doesn't look like the glorious starry images we're used to seeing at APOD.

Much info, analysis, and discussion about Cusiosity's night shots can be found at UMSF forum: www.unmannedspaceflight.com...

Phage
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

Doh!
You're right. I skipped the negative value and used +1 for Earth.
But I'm not sure we can forget about magnitude 2 stars. The Moon is indicated to appear at magnitude 2.

You're right. I downloaded the 19MB .tiff and cropped your Stellarium screen-cap to match the field of view. Next I zoomed-in to the tiff until I could see the 2.6 magnitude Moon. It was way down in the pixilated muck, but it gave me an idea of what to look for.

Looking at the cropped screen-cap, Alpha Aries was out-of-frame, but 2.6 mag Beta Aries should be in-frame near the top, right of center; and possibly 2nd mag Beta Andromeda over on the far right.

On the .tiff, I found the brighter Beta Andromeda first. it's kind of orange & pixelated. Beta Aries was harder to find (it's 1/30 the brightness of Earth), but it is there, kind of bluish. Beta Aries was tough enough to find that I'm not going to waste my time looking for anything fainter.

Conclusion: Stars are visible in the OP image, however...
- Our Moon is barely visible in the 19MB hi-resolution image.
- There are only two stars in the image frame that are roughly as bright as our Moon.
- Like our Moon, these stars are barely visible, and you have to know where to look, and search in exactly the right place.
- The 389kB .jpg image does not have the resolution to show these faint objects.

reply to post by wildespace


what this guy said ^

if anyone cared to zoom in on the actual picture we're talking about, you'd see thousands of red and blue dots not unlike the shared picture in the post i'm responding to.

Off topic a bit, I just found it interesting the most visible of the possibly intentionally "blurred" stars seem to form a perfect rectangle around the images center. Here's a professionaly done MSPaint vs of what I'm talking about. No conspiracying, just interesting!

imageshack.com...

reply to post by MysterX


Well they did say this was just at sunset. That when the planet's are easiest to spot. Still too much light for stars.

It just looks like light pollution from the setting Sun.

Only on ATS do the same folks who claim they see statues on NASA pictures taken from the surface of Mars also try and say that NASA photos taken on Mars are actually fakes. Because, logic.