It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
we get a taste of this light when out in the countryside when it's a full moon. Very bright but cold light. Full, hard shadows. Just black and white. No diffraction, no softness.
It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
I did something similar with their lunar libration videos captures by the LRO [1], using the frames from the video with the Windows desktop background 'slideshow' functionality (desktop background changes once a minute).
This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?
How are the videos captured or processed? The solar lens flares are smoothly interpolated but the moon surface shows lower FPS, almost feels like the flares were on a separate layer.
My guess: they are the same update rate. The lens flares have blurrier edges and move less across the screen. This makes the jumps less obvious.
CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
Why does the moon looks soft/smooth in the videos? Is it because the material is soft? Or a scale thing. If you consider mountains on Earth they look jagged.
- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see
- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
One of the coolest things ever is you can see the shadows and depths of the craters on the moon from here on Earth, with a cheap ~$15 telescope or probably binoculars too. I remember buying the galileoscope for $15 many years ago and was absolutely shocked how cool the moon looked, and how 3D.
Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.
(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)
I noticed this too. Something about the perspective is unnerving, like an amusement park ride. You can see clearly that the moon is small, the craters are big, and the orbiting spacecraft is moving really really fast, all at the same time. None of that is apparent from video of low Earth orbit. And then the stark lighting makes it feel even more bizarre and alien.
The most 3-D experience that I have had with the moon, on the cheap, is when its not in it's full phase. With a cheap telescope, when you observe the edge of the partial-phase moon's crescent, you see the "terminator." It suddenly feels so different, finally you see the moon's bumpy spherical nature. It's like you are flying just above it.
> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief
> - ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!
Much smaller, no atmosphere. You can get a lot closer to it in orbit. Until Apollo 14, the LM would enter a 50,000 ft periapsis on the way to landing. Dunno the exact phasing of this lander, but that video could be from a similar height (or lower, if you have good navigation.)
> ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
Yes. That flyby video looks almost like taken straight from KSP - the only thing that made my mind stop feeling like I'm watching a Mun landing, was the light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the actual lander - it looked too computationally expensive for a videogame.
I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.
(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)
Yeah that's true, but I haven't really experienced the Apollo era personally. After the "gap" between the old space race, and the new race inspired by private space agencies, I do feel we are getting closer, to the moon at least.
It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.
As far as flights of fancy regarding the moon, I enjoyed Randall Munroe's "What if we put a pool on the moon" thought experiment. I would enjoy the experience of propelling myself out of the water like a dolphin!
There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement".
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
But if we are to go more interesting places... shouldn't we have down breathing, eating, and sleeping on the moon so well that it isn't much of a cost or a risk? It's inherently a good testing ground for things we need to do reliably much further later.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
Robotics is unfortunately not there yet, unless we plan to send everything there fully assembled with zero maintenance ever. Unless you mean purely for basic exploration.
Tell that to the people of deadliest catch and dirty jobs: we have robots now that can do everything we want to without needing to sleep or eat! Sadly, we're not using them because they don't exist yet...
As a factorio player, once they added remote operation of robots to the game, I never travel back to a planet after I've got it set up. If they made it so I could land a robot, I'd never go in the first place.
Those were direct results of "We just invented a hammer that is great at causing the apocalypse and are desperately looking for nails that don't cause the apocalypse."
Other options include but are not limited to: Digging massive rivers/canals. Digging a massive harbor. Digging a large hole. Digging through some mountains. Digging holes to store toxic waste.
What gets me is that the videos warp the perspective of the Earth in a way where it doesn't appear large anymore; and I wonder if that would happen with astronauts too.
They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.
The moon is a long way away. The furthest man has ever been from terra firma. The Earth is small at that distance compared to images from ISS or even a geosync satellite. The distance to the moon is about 30 Earths for perspective, over 400,000 kilometers away.
Readit News
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...
There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
*Unless you're willing to spend $10,000+
Nvidia did a great presentation about the lighting for the original. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVP6zDZN7I
it reflects light in (roughly) the direction of light source
so you have /even bigger/ contrast between shadow and its border than you'd expect from "no air to soften shadows with dispersed light"
It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
[0]: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0577bWqlyiqqaz9zeI0cEcE7Q
[1]: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5415
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54353240540/in/al...
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CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
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Having too much karma points... ;-)
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Also:
- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see
- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.
(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)
Deleted Comment
> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief
The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!
Yes. That flyby video looks almost like taken straight from KSP - the only thing that made my mind stop feeling like I'm watching a Mun landing, was the light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the actual lander - it looked too computationally expensive for a videogame.
I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.
(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)
It has been for the last 65 years. ;)
That's huge progress!
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/feds-who-forced-ukrain...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/max-polyakov-and-no...
https://noosphereventures.com/eos-to-create-its-own-radar-mi...
It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.
Or we could just blow it up, which might be fun in its own right: https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIBBj6KR-Y
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16QpeWjf1Hbxp_15D5Vtx...
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
Imagine stepping outside into a world where absolutely everything is coated in dark gray copy toner that gets ingrained into all that touches it.
I don’t think I could do it due to the anxiety.
Dead Comment
Mr Show has held up well, maybe even gotten better with time.
Other options include but are not limited to: Digging massive rivers/canals. Digging a massive harbor. Digging a large hole. Digging through some mountains. Digging holes to store toxic waste.
Truly a revolutionary pair of projects.
They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.
Here's a very famous image from Apollo 8:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82693/earthrise-rev...
For a different perspective, check out the view of earth/moon from Mars:
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/earth-and-moon-as-viewed-f...
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- https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/touchdown-carrying-nasa-sc...