back to article Rare video: Moon flashing in front of giant's face

Boffins at the European Space Agency are hugging themselves gleefully after capturing a dramatic vid from a space probe in orbit above Mars which shows the Martian moon Phobos zooming across the backdrop provided by gigantic Jupiter. As readers will appreciate, the vid isn't all that stunning in and of itself: but we're …

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  1. Tom_

    why

    Why the comedy pauses? Were four of those 104 frames duplicated in their video editing software?

  2. pjcard
    Thumb Up

    Looks pretty stunning to me

    You must be getting jaded :)

  3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Trollface

    I was waiting for the stone to transform into monorail cat...

    Sadly, no

  4. David 139
    Black Helicopters

    But where's the sound?

    Guys... it's got no sound... must be a fake.

    1. ratfox

      Dude, photoshopped

      You should totally hear the whooshing sound of a moon passing merely 10000km away. And Zarathustra, you should hear Zarathustra, too.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    And all only 6000 years old

    *snigger*

  6. xeroks
    Alert

    Pahh!

    I played much more realistic versions of asteroids years ago, with better animation.

    Having the spaceship in the middle being circular means the player can't tell which way he's facing - pretty poorly thought out that.

    But worse is that the collision engine doesn't look like it's working: the spaceship didn't go bang.

    1 out of 10 - rubbish. wouldn't buy it.

    :)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Where were the Leather Goddesses?

    Oh, for the days of 8-bit probes...

  8. ravenviz Silver badge
    Boffin

    Amazing

    What amazes me is that someone is sitting there working out all these orientations so they know which ones to film. Or is it all computers these days?

    1. defiler
      Terminator

      We're all computers

      You're the last one left...

      1. Beelzeebub
        Flame

        To defiler

        Ahem, you forgot me, and you'll pay for it hehe!

  9. Mike Flugennock
    Thumb Up

    Whoa. Suh-WEET.

    What's even more compelling here is that from Mars, Jupiter is visible as an actual sphere in the sky, instead of something small, glinting and starlike, as it appears from here.

    I remember an even better image -- from the Mars Global Surveyor, iirc -- showing Jupiter as seen from Martian orbit. It wasn't a time-lapse video, but was still even more amazing as it was in natural color, and Jupiter's atmospheric banding and Great Red Spot were clearly visible.

    Also outstanding was a shot of the Trifid Nebula taken from Cassini; it was doing a camera calibration check prior to a flyby of one of Saturn's moons, focusing on a random patch of space, and whaddya know, there was the Trifid Nebula! Granted, it was in grayscale and at a resolution nearer to most early/mid 20th Century astrophotography, but, still... a clear shot of the Trifid taken from a probe orbiting Saturn. Man, that foto was made of awesome.

    1. Martin Budden Silver badge
      Alien

      Mr

      "What's even more compelling here is that from Mars, Jupiter is visible as an actual sphere in the sky, instead of something small, glinting and starlike, as it appears from here."

      Erm, maybe the camera has a telescopic lense? That's how we know about the Great Red Spot in the first place: telescopes.

      1. Mike Flugennock

        MGS telescopic lens?

        I honestly don't recall exactly which of its lenses/cameras MGS used to get that Jupiter shot, other than that it wasn't anything especially "long" -- the MGS cameras, iirc, were designed more for looking at things slightly closer, like the surface of Mars, or the occasional shot of one of its moons near the limb, and even at their "telephoto" setting, weren't really "long" enough for distant astronomical photography, certainly not the same as the cameras aboard the HST.

        Also iirc, it wasn't an especially magnified shot -- Jupiter was quite small in the overall image, but just large enough for atmospheric banding and coloration to be discernible when that part of the image was cropped and magnified. I'm taking a SWAG that Jupiter viewed from Earth orbit with the same lens/camera would still be rather twinkly-dot-like.

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