Wow, you got to love this! As most of you know, China launched its first lunar probe, the Chang'e 1, in October. After a sucessful launch, the Chinese space agency released a photo featuring a patch of grey moon surface with the requisite amount of craters.....or so it would seem. Astute Chinese internet users soon cried foul though. It seems the photo that was released is almost a carbon copy of a photo released by NASA years ago! What makes this even weirder is that the Chinese photo has what appears to be photoshopped craters added in. (no I am not making this up! LOL)
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Monday, December 03, 2007
China says moon pictures not faked from NASA
Wow, you got to love this! As most of you know, China launched its first lunar probe, the Chang'e 1, in October. After a sucessful launch, the Chinese space agency released a photo featuring a patch of grey moon surface with the requisite amount of craters.....or so it would seem. Astute Chinese internet users soon cried foul though. It seems the photo that was released is almost a carbon copy of a photo released by NASA years ago! What makes this even weirder is that the Chinese photo has what appears to be photoshopped craters added in. (no I am not making this up! LOL)
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2 comments:
Good story, but I hate having to defend one of the worst governments on Earth. Despite the obvious similarities (the Moon is anything but dynamic) with the Clementine mosaic, it is clearly not the same picture.
One noticeable difference is the angle that light is striking the craters. This change would be virtually impossible in Photoshop.
Another difference is the number of small craters seen in the higher resolution Chang-e 1 lunar probe. These craters will all be either confirmed or discredited by KAGUYA, Earth based observatories, and later probes. The Chinese government is evil but they are not stupid enough to add random craters when they would be so easily caught in the next couple of years.
So why is the first photograph/mosaic of the same area as a well known Clementine mosaic? Likely they wanted to show up NASA in a quiet way in order to gain respect.
As for the mysterious "new crater" I would have guessed that until I read a very reasonable explanation at The Planetary Society
Of course, it could be new "fake" using adaptive optics at one of the better Chinese observatories, but this too seems unlikely.
And though I would love to see that government humiliated, this does not seem to be a fake, imho.
Wolfkahn the only thing I would have to add would be that the newest versions of Photoshop are amazing in the special effects that they can do. One that I have seen implemented in version 9 is to be able to change the lighting direction to any angle or type that you desire. Difficult on the scale that we are talking about with the Moon and craters...but not impossible - the question would be, why bother...in such a closed system as the Chinese government, why bother to chance possible disclosure. Easier to just cover up a failure.
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