# Mercury probe snaps stunning photos of our planet during Earth flyby



## Timeshifter (Apr 26, 2021)

Think about the camera & tech in the palm of your hand.

Then see this ..  link to working animation... link



A spacecraft bound for Mercury beamed home *stunning* views of Earth during a crucial flyby conducted early today (April 10).

BepiColombo, a joint mission conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is headed to our solar system's innermost planet. But to reach that destination, the spacecraft, which launched in October 2018, needs to conduct a complex sequence of nine different planetary flybys.

The first of those passes was close to home, as today (April 10), BepiColombo came within 7,877 miles (12,677 kilometers) of Earth.

*Fortunately*, the spacecraft was well prepared to make the most of the opportunity since, in addition to its more technical scientific instruments, BepiColombo carries three different cameras. Mission personnel are still processing many of the images snapped by the spacecraft, but ESA and JAXA have released both individual images and animated series produced as BepiColombo headed toward Earth.




link


> Note: This OP was recovered from the Sh.org archive.





> Note: Archived Sh.org replies to this OP are included in this thread.


----------



## Citezenship (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: CitizenShipDate: 2020-04-10 19:12:34Reaction Score: 6


In space no one can hear you scream, thats from alien and not nasa.

I have not looked at the link but,
do they not have colour cameras 

Also with all the light shining on the satellite how the f**k would you see anything, kinda like how it is much more difficult to see stars from a heavily light polluted city!


----------



## AthroposRex (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: AnthroposRexDate: 2020-04-11 00:16:45Reaction Score: 5


Looks like the blue marble.
Fake. 

In fact, rotate this blue marble 90 degrees clockwise, and I think it may be a match.


----------



## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: ObertrynDate: 2020-04-11 00:47:20Reaction Score: 11


What's with the shitty grey filter? I thought we lived in 2020, not 1935.


----------



## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: esgee1Date: 2020-04-12 00:10:05Reaction Score: 0




AnthroposRex said:


> Looks like the blue marble.
> Fake.
> View attachment 44059
> In fact, rotate this blue marble 90 degrees clockwise, and I think it may be a match.


The photo taken by the spacecraft doesn't look at all like the photo you linked above. The cloud formations are different in each photo.

There's also a reason why most outer space photos are taken in so called "black & white". This is a great layman's article by Cecil Adams @straightdope.com with more detailed explanation.

_Here's an excerpt:_


> Space cameras are configured differently. They’re designed to measure not just all visible light but also the infrared and ultraviolet light past each end of the visible spectrum. Filtering is used primarily to make scientifically interesting details stand out. “Most common planetary camera designs have filter wheels that rotate different light filters in front of the sensor,” Izenberg says. “These filters aren’t selected to produce ‘realistic’ color that the human eye would see, but rather to collect light in wavelengths characteristic of different types of rocks and minerals,” to help identify them.


As for the spacecraft, here's a cool video showing more of the Earth flyby:


Cheers!


----------



## AthroposRex (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: AnthroposRexDate: 2020-04-12 22:11:43Reaction Score: 1




esgee1 said:


> The photo taken by the spacecraft doesn't look at all like the photo you linked above. The cloud formations are different in each photo.
> 
> There's also a reason why most outer space photos are taken in so called "black & white". This is a great layman's article by Cecil Adams @straightdope.com with more detailed explanation.
> 
> ...


Well, not exactly. Here is the blue marble rotated, Grey scaled, and blown out in contrast.

You're right, it's not precisely the same.


----------



## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: jd755Date: 2020-04-13 08:17:08Reaction Score: 3




esgee1 said:


> As for the spacecraft, here's a cool video showing more of the Earth flyby:


What is it pushing against in the space vacuum?
How do those hinged solar panels survive the take off speed of rockets?
Why do picture signals from space craft so far away get back to earth on solar power and batteries?
Surely with the increasing distance from earth the signal drop off will increase and therefore the amount of power needed to send it must increse yet there is finite battery power which is always running down as their eficciency dims with use and time.
How dows the satellite guide itself in the vastness of space where there is nothing to triangulate off?
How does it know where it is?
How does it know where the earth is?
EDIT
_Forgotten flight: the lonely voyage of #Apollo6.* Apollo 6 launched 52 years ago #otd April 4 1968* The unmanned Saturn/Apollo 6 mission was designed as the final qualification of the Saturn V launch vehicle and Apollo spacecraft for manned Apollo missions._


----------



## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: MrB0N3sDate: 2020-04-16 22:04:31Reaction Score: 6


Food for thought when looking at images of Saturn, Ouranus, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune,  I started to realize that the cloudlike and dusty atmospheric conditions that produce so many hazy and interesting mixes of flowing coloured gas, could easily be rendered shots of microscopic imagery upscaled to look like the shifting surface a planet supposedly made out of heavy gasses, many substances under microscope have been photographed in the same ways they photograph space, with special sensors made for the aether, some microscopes work the same way when photographing such a tiny space. Upon reflection could anyone else see how easily oil, water, dust, alcohol, just about anything could be placed under a microscope, photographed in high resolution a few thousand times and then someone colourizes them and stiches them around a globe model and you have convincing surface imagery for any gas giants or cloudy planets surface.
On this same line of thinking, could images of earth, and microscopic imagery and other sources of artistic texturework all be blended together into a massive image of a planet, entirely made of photoshop collaging earths deserts and these textures together, making up new geographic formations in the pareidolia of random image blending, and then all one would have to do, like before is colourize it, and then apply its imagery to the globe model. 

This method of editing images I should mention would work as far back as photo editing goes, multi image exposure is so far from a new technique its laughable, its almost how photography was progressed by accident, experiments in exposure that is.
I could see an artsy photographer team inventing every surface with these techniques, mixing image textures through photodevelopment I will stress is not a new phenomena, this could have all been done physically for even more authenticity and visual fidelity.

How hard would it be to fake surface of other planets by using the next weirdest most alien thing close to home, the microscopic world?


----------



## DanFromMN (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: DanfromMNDate: 2020-04-16 22:07:58Reaction Score: 1




Timeshifter said:


> Think about the camera & tech in the palm of your hand.
> 
> Then see this ..  link to working animation... link
> 
> ...


F these guys.  I cant even imagine how little tech it would actually take to snap a picture of our plane t from fakespace


----------



## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: esgee1Date: 2020-04-17 22:23:04Reaction Score: 6


We probably live in a giant organism, the observable universe actually being "atoms" rotating around one another. Heck, our bodies are a universe for smaller organisms than us.


----------



## DanFromMN (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: DanfromMNDate: 2020-04-18 00:28:34Reaction Score: 1


Obligatory

 "ITS NOT A SPINNING BALL"

 we live under a hard fast barrier keeping stuff separate from where we live....
statement completed.


----------

