How do they get those "pictures" from outer space, of earth, from past the moon?

Question

I was watching this TED Talk and they showed a picture of earth but zoomed out so far it was only a pixel among many many galaxies. See it at 1:43 of this TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_s_call_to_join_the_seti_search.html

I know we don't have satellites out that far so it's obviously not a real photo. How are they doing this? Is it a visualization of the data they have on galaxies?

Answer 1

They are all real photos, though not all of them are really of earth.



The first one (1:34) is a famous real photo of earth, taken on one of the Apollo missions.



The 2nd one (1:36) is a real photo of earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe at a distance of 4 billion miles. Here's one of many places you can see the same photo: (http://my.opera.com/kurzon/blog/2009/05/05/carl-sagan-the-pale-blue-dot )



The 3rd one (1:39) is a (real) photo of Galaxy M81, probably taken by the Hubble telescope. You can see this galaxy with binoculars (but not this bright). This is obviously not the galaxy we live in(!), so the "Here" label is put there just for imaginitive illustration.



The 4th one (1:43) is also a real photo, taken by the Hubble. It's a famous picture containing hundreds of galaxies; you can see a better shot of it here: (http://www.nerdmodo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/1-ultra-deep-fieldmost-distant-galaxy1.jpg ). Again, obviously the "Here" label isn't really pointing to our own galaxy.

Answer 2

The first two pictures in the sequence are real photographs of the Earth. I don't know the name of the first one but it looks like it was probably taken by an Apollo mission in low orbit around the Moon, or possibly from the surface of the Moon. The second one is called the Pale Blue Dot, and was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990, at a distance from the Sun of just over 40 AU, or slightly longer than the semi-major axis of the orbit of Pluto. Voyager 1 is now over 113 AU from the Sun, over twice as far as Pluto EVER goes from the Sun in its orbit; it is currently the most distant human-made object from the Sun, and is still sending back useful radio data to the Earth even now.



The second two images are also real photographs, but clearly not of the Earth. The third image (overall) is actually a photograph of the spiral galaxy M81 (also called Bode's Galaxy after Johann Bode, who also named the planet Uranus, thus making him responsible for all the terrible 'Uranus' jokes), which in reality is located about 12 million light years away from the Earth. You can see a much better photograph of it here:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0705/m81_hst_big.jpg

The fourth image is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a photograph of 'empty space' taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that shows dozens of very distant galaxies. Actually it is only a portion of the full image, which you can see here (warning, it is a very large image, 6200X6200 pixels, 18 megabytes):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Hubble_ultra_deep_field_high_rez_edit1.jpg



Note that if the Universe as a whole were small enough, it would in theory be possible for a powerful enough telescope to look deep into space and take a picture of the Milky Way itself, the light from the Milky Way having traveled all the way around the Universe and back to its starting point due to the curvature of space. However, this would also necessitate the existence of stripe-like patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which have not been observed. It would also be possible to take a distorted picture of the Milky Way by looking at a very distant black hole and imaging the light that had been bent around it and back towards us (like a sort of astronomical mirror), but this would require instruments far more sensitive than any we have ever built.

Answer 3

"Earthrise" or the picture of planet earth rising from the horizon of the moon, was taken on 70mm color film on the first manned journey to the moon in 1968. It's one of the 100 pictures that changed the world.



"The Pale Blue Dot" was taken on the journey of Voyager 1, which is a robotic space probe launched to visit the outer parts of the Solar System.



"The Blue Marble" was taken from a distance of 45,000 kilometers from earth by people who journeyed in this manned outer space mission with the Apollo 17.



Nope, they're not satellites. They're other stuff.

Answer 4

We've sent manmade spacecrafts (not necessarily carrying human bodies) throughout the solar system. Many are real photos and many are artist's renditions.





As for "pale blue dot", that was taken from Saturn's orbit, not from another galaxy.



We don't even yet have a spacecraft to get anywhere interesting beyond the solar system other than just interstellar space.



As for the picture of the entire galaxy, that is a computer rendering of all the known stars produced in a three dimensional map. It is very hard to photograph the Milky Way Galaxy, because we are inside it, and no spacecraft has yet to leave it.

Answer 5

One of the images looks like the famous "pale blue dot", an actual photo from a deep space mission. The others are likely graphic representations as I doubt even the furthest out craft could have taken them.



See: http://www.fogonazos.es/2007/06/best-pictures-of-earth-from-deep-space.html

Answer 6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot



I don't know if this is the photo you are referring to, but it's a famous one.



Sometimes we send space probes or craft out way beyond the distance our manned shuttles or satellites go. That is what takes most of these photos. The "Pale Blue Dot" one was taken by Voyager I.

Answer 7

they have satellites past pluto so it may be a real picture or it could just be an artists rendition of what the earth looks like from very far away.

Answer 8

its computer animation mate.



its like in transformers 2, how did they get the camera outside an alien space station light years from earth?

like in some movies where the camera follows the bullet, they cant actually do that