Saturday 19 December 2015

NASA Has Just Released This Stunning Picture,

of the earth taken from the moon,


it is actually a composite picture, two cameras were in fact used, a black and white high-res Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), and a lower-resolution colour Wide Angle Camera (WAC), the NAC gets the nice detail, and the WAC offers the vibrant colours, NASA says the LRO spacecraft first has to be rolled to the side, and then turned to get the widest lunar horizon for the NAC, add to that the fact that LRO is travelling 3,580 miles per hour not an easy task, then the really complicated bit, the images are processed to adjust for the motion of the Earth and the moon, You can reminisce over previous "Earthrise" photos from NASA, with the first taken in 1966, it is important to note, the Earth is not actually rising and setting from the moon's vantage point, as Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe, principal investigator for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, says in NASA's announcement post, "the Earth may not move across the 'sky', but the view is not static, future astronauts will see the continents rotate in and out of view and the ever-changing pattern of clouds will always catch one's eye, at least on the nearside." all I know is that it is a stunning picture.


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