High quality photographs of planet earth from space. Planet earth view from space photo and video

What are the possible uses satellites flying over our heads in real time You know?

We can simply observe them, we can use them to calculate coordinates and obtain images of the area.

In addition to the static satellite map of the Earth presented above, you can use the service or this interactive map to view:

But you can look at such a map from a satellite on the Yandex Maps service.

World map from satellite from Yandex maps online:
(Use + and – to change the map scale)

Google Earth Maps also provides the opportunity for virtual travel to any corner of the world.

(To move around the map, zoom in, out of the map, change the image angle, use the navigation in the form of arrows and + and - signs at the top of the map. Also try to control the map by holding the right mouse button)

Enter the city name:

You can watch the Earth in real time from a satellite! You can find out more about this in our article “”

The capabilities of satellites today are simply fantastic. It turns out there is one more thing no less interesting activity– satellite fishing!
If you have:
1) Satellite dish
2) Computer DVB tuner (DVB-PCI tuner, DVB card)
Then you can go fishing. But what can we catch and what is the point?

And the meaning is this - when sending a request to issue (download) a file, you send a request to a special server, and the answer comes via satellite to the receiving dish. One person sends a request, but anyone can accept it, because the satellite does not know where a specific user is and transmits information to everyone who falls within its coverage area. In order to receive the file, you need special card to receive a signal from. The card has a unique number by which the satellite identifies the recipient, allowing him to receive discrete data. In turn, the “fisherman” catches the entire stream, all the user information from some provider. To catch something worthwhile from this stream, you need special grabber programs that have filters where you can specify file extensions, size, etc. The only thing is that grabbers identify a file not by its extension, but by its file signature, so you will additionally need to download codes with filters. You will also need renaming programs to sort files into directories, remove unnecessary ones and clones.
Who knows, maybe you will be able to catch something “big” or stumble upon information from the “Top secret” section, which will bring a little romance and adventurous notes into your life.

Seeing the Earth from space is an unforgettable experience. It is something soothing, beautiful and inspiring. Let's hope that in the near future many, and not just a select few, will be able to enjoy the view of our home planet from space. Until we have such an opportunity, we have to be content with breathtaking photographs like the ten that are included in this collection.

(Total 11 photos)

1. Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles from Voyager 1 (the luminous point in the center of the right flare). This photograph is an enlargement of one of the 16 frames that make up the panoramic view. solar system. (NASA)

2. The most detailed view of the Earth for 2002, collected by a team of specialists from many frames taken over many months. Most of the data was collected by the MODIS probe on board the Terra research satellite. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stockli)

3. Earthrise. The photo was taken from Apollo 11 in 1969 during the first manned flight and landing on the Moon. (NASA)

4. The first shot of the Earth and the Moon in one frame. It was taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of 11.66 million kilometers from Earth. (NASA)

5. Terminator line on the surface of the Earth, photograph taken during the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. (NASA)

7.View of the Earth and Moon from Mars. The first ever photograph of Earth from another planet, taken by the Mariner 10 probe. (SA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems)

8. Earthrise, view from dark side Moons. Photo from Apollo 16, 1972. The first photographs of the dark side of the Moon were taken by the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft in 1959. Man first saw it with his own eyes in 1968 from Apollo 8. (NASA)

9. An Apollo 17 astronaut plants a flag on the surface of the Moon, 1972. The mission, which lasted 504 hours, made it possible to bring 117 kg of soil samples from the Moon and carry out in-depth geological exploration. (NASA)

10. The crescent of the Earth above the lunar horizon. Photo from Apollo 15, 1971. This lunar mission was the first to use an all-terrain vehicle (MRV), capable of reaching speeds of up to 16 km/h.

11. Water is everywhere on our planet - from earth's crust to our cells. Water in the oceans and in the atmosphere. In the form of liquid or ice, it covers 75% of the planet's surface. The total volume of water on Earth is estimated at 1.39 billion cubic kilometers, and 96.5% of this volume is found in the oceans. (NASA Earth Observatory)

August 16th, 2016

Photos from space published on the websites of NASA and other space agencies often attract the attention of those who doubt their authenticity - critics find traces of editing, retouching or color manipulation in the images. This has been the case since the birth of the “moon conspiracy,” and now photographs taken not only by Americans, but also by Europeans, Japanese, and Indians have come under suspicion. Together with the N+1 portal, we are looking into why space images are processed at all and whether, despite this, they can be considered authentic.

In order to correctly assess the quality of space images that we see on the Internet, it is necessary to take into account two important factors. One of them is related to the nature of interaction between agencies and general public, the other is dictated by physical laws.

Public Relations

Space images are one of the most effective means popularization of the work of research missions in the near and deep space. However, not all footage is immediately available to the media.

Images received from space can be divided into three groups: “raw”, scientific and public. Raw, or source, files from spacecraft are sometimes available to everyone, and sometimes not. For example, images taken by the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers or Saturn's Cassini moon are released in near real time, so anyone can see them at the same time as scientists studying Mars or Saturn. Raw photographs of the Earth from the ISS are uploaded to a separate NASA server. Astronauts flood them with thousands, and no one has time to pre-process them. The only thing that is added to them on Earth is a geographic reference to make searching easier.

Usually, public footage that is attached to press releases from NASA and other space agencies is criticized for retouching, because they are the ones that catch the eye of Internet users in the first place. And if you want, you can find a lot of things there. And color manipulation:

Photo of the landing platform of the Spirit rover in visible light and capturing near-infrared light.
(c) NASA/JPL/Cornell

And overlaying several images:

Earth sunrise over the lunar Compton Crater.

And copy-paste:

Fragment of Blue Marble 2001
(c) NASA/Robert Simmon/MODIS/USGS EROS

And even direct retouching, with erasing some image fragments:

Highlighted shotApollo 17 GPN-2000-001137.
(c) NASA

NASA’s motivation in the case of all these manipulations is so simple that not everyone is ready to believe it: it’s more beautiful.

But it’s true, the bottomless blackness of space looks more impressive when it’s not interfered with by debris on the lens and charged particles on the film. A color frame is indeed more attractive than a black and white one. A panorama from photographs is better than individual frames. It is important that in the case of NASA it is almost always possible to find the original footage and compare one with the other. For example, the original version (AS17-134-20384) and the “print” version (GPN-2000-001137) of this image from Apollo 17, which is cited as almost the main evidence of retouching of lunar photographs:

Comparison of frames AS17-134-20384 and GPN-2000-001137
(c) NASA

Or find the rover’s “selfie stick,” which “disappeared” when creating its self-portrait:

Curiosity images from January 14, 2015, Sol 868
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Physics of Digital Photography

Typically, those who criticize space agencies for manipulating color, using filters, or publishing black and white photographs “in this digital age” do not take into account physical processes obtaining digital images. They believe that if a smartphone or camera immediately produces color frames, then a spacecraft should be even more capable of doing this, and they don’t even know what complex operations necessary for the color image to immediately appear on the screen.

Let us explain the theory of digital photography: the matrix of a digital camera is, in essence, solar battery. There is light - there is current, no light - no current. Only the matrix is ​​not a single battery, but many small batteries - pixels, from each of which the current output is separately read. Optics focuses light onto a photomatrix, and electronics reads the intensity of energy released by each pixel. From the data obtained, an image is constructed in shades of gray - from zero current in the dark to maximum in the light, that is, the output is black and white. To make it color, you need to apply color filters. It turns out, oddly enough, that color filters are present in every smartphone and in every digital camera from the nearest store! (For some, this information is trivial, but, according to the author’s experience, for many it will be news.) In the case of conventional photographic equipment, alternating red, green and blue filters are used, which are alternately applied to individual pixels of the matrix - this is the so-called Bayer filter .

The Bayer filter consists of half green pixels, and red and blue each occupy one quarter of the area.
(c) Wikimedia

We repeat here: navigation cameras produce black and white images because such files weigh less, and also because color is simply not needed there. Scientific cameras allow us to extract more information about space than the human eye can perceive, and therefore they use a wider range of color filters:

Matrix and filter drum of the OSIRIS instrument on Rosetta
(c) MPS

Using a filter for near-infrared light, which is invisible to the eye, instead of red, resulted in Mars appearing red in many of the images that made it into the media. Not all of the explanations about the infrared range were reprinted, which gave rise to a separate discussion, which we also discussed in the material “What color is Mars.”

However, the Curiosity rover has a Bayer filter, which allows it to shoot in colors familiar to our eyes, although a separate set of color filters is also included with the camera.

(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The use of individual filters is more convenient in terms of selecting the light ranges in which you want to look at the object. But if this object moves quickly, then its position changes in pictures in different ranges. In the Elektro-L footage, this was noticeable in the fast clouds, which managed to move in a matter of seconds while the satellite was changing the filter. On Mars, a similar thing happened when filming sunsets at the Spirit and Opportunity rover - they do not have a Bayer filter:

Sunset taken by Spirit on Sol 489. Overlay of images taken with 753,535 and 432 nanometer filters.
(c) NASA/JPL/Cornell

On Saturn, Cassini has similar difficulties:

Saturn's moons Titan (behind) and Rhea (front) in Cassini images
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

At the Lagrange point, DSCOVR faces the same situation:

Transit of the Moon across the Earth's disk in a DSCOVR image on July 16, 2015.
(c) NASA/NOAA

To get out of this shooting beautiful photo, suitable for distribution in the media, you have to work in an image editor.

There is another physical factor that not everyone knows about - black and white photographs have more high resolution and clarity compared to color. These are so-called panchromatic images, which include all the light information entering the camera, without cutting off any parts of it with filters. Therefore, many “long-range” satellite cameras shoot only in panchrome, which for us means black and white footage. Such a LORRI camera is installed on New Horizons, and a NAC camera is installed on the LRO lunar satellite. Yes, in fact, all telescopes shoot in panchrome, unless special filters are used. (“NASA is hiding the true color of the Moon” is where it came from.)

A multispectral “color” camera, equipped with filters and having a much lower resolution, can be attached to a panchromatic one. At the same time, its color photographs can be superimposed on panchromatic ones, as a result of which we obtain high-resolution color photographs.

Pluto in panchromatic and multispectral images from New Horizons
(c) NASA/JHU APL/Southwest Research Institute

This method is often used when photographing the Earth. If you know about this, you can see in some frames a typical halo that leaves a blurred color frame:

Composite image of the Earth from the WorldView-2 satellite
(c)DigitalGlobe

It was through this overlay that the very impressive frame of the Earth above the Moon was created, which is given above as an example of overlaying different images:

(c) NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

Additional processing

Often you have to resort to the tools of graphic editors when you need to clean up a frame before publishing. Ideas about the perfection of space technology are not always justified, which is why debris on space cameras is common. For example, the MAHLI camera on the Curiosity rover is simply crap, there’s no other way to put it:

Photo of Curiosity by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Sol 1401
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A speck in the STEREO-B solar telescope gave rise to a separate myth about an alien space station constantly flying over north pole Sun:

(c) NASA/GSFC/JHU APL

Even in space, it is not uncommon for charged particles to leave their traces on the matrix in the form of individual dots or stripes. The longer the shutter speed, the more traces remain; “snow” appears on the frames, which does not look very presentable in the media, so they also try to clear it off (read: “photoshop” it) before publication:

(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Therefore, we can say: yes, NASA photoshops images from space. ESA photoshops. Roscosmos photoshops. ISRO photoshops. JAXA photoshops... Only the Zambian National Space Agency does not photoshop. So if someone is not satisfied with NASA images, then you can always use their space images without any signs of processing.

26 PHOTOS

1. Karst sculptures in southeastern China. (Photo: Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8).
2. Bazman volcano in the southeastern part of Iran. Until now, not a single eruption of this volcano has been documented in history, but volcanic gas is constantly coming out of it. This is probably not an extinct, dormant volcano. The photo was taken from the International Space Station. (Photo: NASA/ISS Expedition 38)
3. And this is the Bering Sea during a phytoplankton bloom. Scientists say the milky water indicates a coccolithophorid algae bloom. (Photo: NASA/MODIS).
4. Lake Elton in Russia, near the border with Kazakhstan. He has a very high level salinity and it is very shallow - on average the depth is about half a meter. And the brown spot that is visible in the picture is the deepest part of the lake, where silt and sediment accumulate, coloring the water. (Photo: NASA).
5. Sunset on the Baltic Sea. The image was taken on June 15, 2014 from the ISS. (Photo: NASA/Expedition 40 ISS)
6. A layer of dust and sand over the Sahara Desert, and above it cumulus clouds. (Photo: NASA/Expedition 40 ISS)
7. Plankton bloom in Indian Ocean, 600 kilometers south of the Australian coast. (Photo: Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory)
8. Melted ice at the top of a glacier in southeast Alaska. The photo was taken on July 16, 2014 from an ER-2 aircraft. (Photo: NASA).
9. Okavango Delta in the Kalahari Desert South Africa, illuminated sunlight. The image was taken on June 6, 2014 from the ISS. (Photo: NASA).
10. These are farmlands in Pampa, Argentina, and among them is a forest guitar. It was created in the late 70s by Pedro Martin Ureta, in honor of his late wife. It is planted with seven thousand trees - cypresses and eucalyptus. The image was taken by the Terra satellite. (Photo: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS).
11. Chiltepe Peninsula in western Nicaragua with the Apoeque volcanic complex. And the water around the peninsula is Lake Managua. In the middle of the peninsula is the Apoeque caldera [a vast cirque-shaped basin with steep walls] with a lake 2.8 kilometers wide and 400 meters deep. The last eruption of Mount Apoeke occurred approximately 2000 years ago. (Photo: NASA/ISS Expedition 38)
12. Cloudless sky over the Iberian Peninsula. In northern Spain you can see the snow-capped Cantabrian Mountains. Below is the largest plateau in Europe - the Meseta, to the east - the Pyrenees, and above them - the French Massif Central. The picture was taken on March 8, 2014. (Photo: Jeff Schmaltz/NASA GSFC)
13. Venetian Lagoon. The red area on the right side of the photo is the Venetian roofs. Above them is Mestre, a district of Venice located on the mainland. (Photo: NASA/ISS Expedition 39)
14. There are 28 active glaciers on the Northern Patagonian Ice Plateau. The San Quentin Glacier is the largest of them; its beginning is visible on the left, flowing into the lake. (Photo: NASA/ISS).
15. Hurricane Edward was captured on September 16, 2014 from the ISS. And its “eye” has a diameter of about 30 kilometers. (Photo: NASA/Expedition 41 ISS/Reid Wiseman).
16. Meanders (smooth bends of the channel) of the Colorado River in national park Canyonlands, in Utah, USA. (Photo: Jesse Allen, Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat)
17. Forest fire in the Funny River area, Alaska. (Photo: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8)
18. Ijen volcano complex on the island of Java. On the right side you can see a caldera with an acidic lake (pH 0.3). (Photo: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat)
19. African sands blown by the winds straight into Atlantic Ocean. Interestingly, these sands overcome the entire ocean to get to the Northern and South America, and the minerals they contain fertilize American forests. Every year, about 40 million tons of Sahara sand fall into the Amazon lowlands. (Photo: NASA/Expedition 40 ISS)
20. Meanders of the Amazon River. (Photo: Jesse Alle/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat).
21. Drought in southern Brazil. The photo shows the dry Jaguari reservoir, one of five reservoirs that supply water to the state of Sao Paulo. (Photo: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat)
22. Badyn-Jaran in China. The picture shows lakes among the highest dunes in the world (reaching a height of 500 meters). (Photo: NASA).
23. King Sound - bay in Western Australia, where you can observe the largest tides in the world. (Photo: NASA/Expedition 40 ISS)
24. This is Nishino-shima - a volcanic island belonging to Japan. Last November, as a result of the eruption of an underwater volcano, new island just 500 meters away, which grew so quickly that within a month both islands became one. The photo was taken on March 30, 2014. (Photo: Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8).
25. Murzuk ( sandy desert) in Libya. The dark area in the image is the volcanic Tibesti Mountains. The image was taken from the ISS on November 26, 2014. (Photo: NASA/ISS Expedition 42)
26. This is us! This remarkable photograph of our planet was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite on March 30, 2014. (Photo: Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory)

1. In the photo - the mouth of the Betsibuka River in the northwestern part of the island of Madagascar. The photo was taken on March 8, 2005 by a member of the ISS-10 crew who worked on the ISS from October 16, 2004 to April 24, 2005.

2. The picture shows Hurricane Dean- the strongest tropical cyclone of the Atlantic hurricane season. Photo taken on August 18, 2007 by crew members on the space shuttle Endeavor.

3. October 5−13, 1984 - view of the Great Himalayas from the southwest. The photography covers the territories of India, Pakistan and China. The photo was taken during the 6th flight of the Challenger shuttle by one of the crew members.

4. Great lakes, located in North America. Lake Ontario is in the foreground, and the city of Detroit is in the center of the image. The photo was taken during the 19th space flight of Discovery in September 1994.

5. Cleveland Volcano Eruption on Chuginadak Island, North America. The photo was taken on May 23, 2006 by members of the thirteenth long-term crew of the International Space Station ISS-13.

6. Flying over Madagascar. This photo is the most recent in our collection: it was taken by astronaut Ricky Arnold, who on March 21 of this year flew into space as a flight engineer-2 spaceship"Soyuz MS-08" with Oleg Artemyev and Andrew Feistel. Two days later, the ship docked with the Russian segment of the ISS.

7. And this one is famous The shot was taken from a distance of 29,000 kilometers back in 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 mission. The image is called Blue Marble and shows the Earth fully illuminated by the Sun.