Frozen Earth

Iceberg Images by Ajay Goyal Don’t really post too many Terrestrial Earth images here becuase it is kind of cheating, but these iceberg images by Ajay Goyal are really nice and remind us of what an exotic planet our home really is. Imagine if these were images returned from a probe on a distant planet.

Earth and Moon Seen from Mars

Earth and Moon from MRO in Mars Orbit This is an image of Earth and the moon acquired by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is in orbit around Mars. The distance from MRO to Earth at the time the image was taken was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles). Hard to image such details could be drawn out in an image taken from such a distance as that.

A similar image of Jupiter was also acquired by MRO some months ago.

Earth Aurora and Crater from ISS

Earth Aurora from ISS Above is an aurora as seen from The International Space Station. The large white circular feature seen at the top is the Manicouagan impact crater located in northern Canada.

NOTE: Some image alteration has been applied to remove a large amount of noise and discoloring largely from the area of black space below the Earth.

Smallsteps Wallpaper: Lunar Orbiter 1

In August 1966 NASA began the Lunar Orbiter series of missions that were intended to get up-close images of smooth areas of the moon suitable for landing both Surveyor unmanned lander probes as well as the eventual manned missions of Apollo. Note that these missions had only begun 3 short years before the successful Apollo 11 mission that saw mankind take its first steps onto the surface of another world… now that is some turn-around time! Lunar Orbiter 1 actually took place while the Surveyor series of missions had already begun. This would suggest that some of the data obtained from the Lunar Orbiter probes were collected and used immediately in the execution of Surveyor missions. Smallsteps Wallpaper: Lunar Orbiter 1

This first Lunar Orbiter mission is credited for returning the first 2 images of Earth as seen from the distance of the moon. Most people refer to these kinds of images as “Earthrise” images, although that description is incorrect in the traditional sense of the word. Since the same side of the moon always faces Earth, an Earthrise is only possible in a Lunar orbiting spacecraft that is in effect chasing the Earth. Down on the surface of the moon… if you can see Earth in the sky, then you will always see Earth in the sky. It will always be in the same place, at the same size and at all times of the Lunar day.

This STS-82 Image is Not a Painting

Since I have been posting so many images from STS-118 recently, I started rummaging through the Space Shuttle archives at the NASA website. One image stood apart from the rest as completely unreal. Even as a thumbnail, I assumed it was “space art” or some kind of promotional image used on a poster and almost didn’t even click on it. However, this is not a composite, collage or painting. It is actually an image of astronaut Joseph R. Tanner from STS-82 taken back in 1997. STS-82 Spacewalker

Take a look at what can be seen in here. It is like the entire Shuttle program in one snapshot. There is the obvious… the sunburst, crescent Earth, back end of the Shuttle Orbiter itself and of course the astronaut. Take a closer look and there is more at a glance… In Tanner’s visor is the reflection of the other spacewalker Gregory J. Harbaugh who took the image and attached to Tanner’s arm is the small checklist of tasks that astronauts use on such difficult tasks such as spacewalks.

The original exposure was quite grainy and lots of color noise due to the low-light conditions. So it was cleaned up a bit color-wise and a duplicate of the image itself has been blurred and screened over the other. This gives the image a sort of “romantic” glow but more importantly helps reduce the noise while maintaining the image’s overall details.

On a note of interest, STS-82 also happens to be one of the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions which extended the life of that most valuable scientific program.

More STS-118

Yet another from 118.Endeavor Against a Cloudy Earth

One of the best details of this one is that you can see an astronaut intentionally peeking out of the second window on the left. Seeing a person looking out the window reminds us how real it is. It’s like seeing a friend in a car go by… only our friend’s car is floating in the hostile vacuum of space.

The iPhone Set 01: Bodies of Major Interest

The iPhone Set 01: Bodies of Major Interest If I am going to keep making these things… I’d be a fool to not include a set for the Apple iPhone. Coincidentally, when you purchase your iPhone and do not yet have a phone service, the phone displays a full-disc image of the Earth pretty much displayed exactly as these do when uploaded to your iPhone. So in the spirit of continuity, you can now opt instead to have Mercury, Venus, Earth, The Moon (Luna), Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Saturn, Enceladus, Titan, Iapetus, Hyperion, Uranus, Miranda, Neptune or Triton grace your screen instead of the default Earth.

The easiest way to install wallpapers to your iPhone is to make a special set in iPhoto and simply drag all the files to that folder. Then in iTunes have your iPhone sync that folder to your photos collection. After that it is as simple as opening the “Photos” area of your iPhone. Go to your new folder of images and open whichever image you want. Then tap on the image just once and assign it as a wallpaper using the “Use as Wallpaper” button in the lower left corner of the screen.

If you have a PC I have no idea in hell how the hell you get images into your iPhone. I would buy a Mac… you have an iPhone and use iTunes… you are half-way there.

For a version of these with no graphics see this link.

Wallpaper 2560x1600 Set 03: The Planets

The planets – the complete set for collectors! While there are literally thousands of images of the planets to choose from… full globe high resolution images are actually fairly rare. They usually require many exposures to be stitched together to make one large complete image. This is not only difficult to work out across the great distances of space, but also soaks up a large amount of valuable spacecraft time and energy. This set represents the best available images of each planet in our Solar System. Wallpaper 2560x1600 Set 03

Sorry, no Pluto for more than one reason.

Smallsteps Wallpaper: V2 Rocket

While looking at all the strange images from old Soviet moon missions on Don Mitchell’s site, I thought it would be interesting to design a set of wallpapers from these early images. I call the series “Smallsteps” as in Neil Armstrong’s famous, “One small step…” quote from Apollo 11. Obviously, there would have been no “giant leap” without a large number of these other “small steps” preceding the Apollo Program (although some of the images I have planned actually come after or during the Apollo program). Smallsteps Wallpaper: V2 Rocket

To me, the fact that the human race was even doing space exploration back then seems almost out of time — and then you look at the spacecraft that were sending back these images and it is amazing that anything really ever worked. Tin cans with cameras sending back images that were often just as bizzare and rough as the vessels that carried them. It is even more incredible when you consider that people eventually started strapping themselves to these rockets and floated around the vacuum of space in boxes wrapped with foil.

Seems appropriate enough to start the whole set off with the V2 images of Earth sent back in the shockingly early year of 1948. According the the Air and Space Museum these are the first images of the Earth taken from space in history. The image itself I suspect was just scanned from some print and the number tags and directionals are original (although there were about 17 of them and I removed a majority of them in Photoshop).