原创 Amazing images of the dark side of the moon

I think it's fair to say that my wife (Gina The Georgeous) is not a huge fan of science fiction. I'm sure I've heard her mutter the phrase "mindless drivel" under her breath on more than one occasion.

Gina thinks I'm incredibly clever because I know all sorts of "stuff" that she doesn't (and vice versa, of course). She uses me as her "go-to" resource whenever she has a question pertaining to science or technology. Paradoxically, a lot of what I know I learned from reading science fiction.

As a case in point, just the other day Gina received a communication from our local weather man. I'm not sure if this was via Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe they are just close friends. The thrust of this message was an amazing picture showing the dark (back) side of the moon passing across the face of the earth.

NASA captures an illuminated view of the dark side of the moon passing the face of the Earth (Photo: NASA/NOAA).

 

The accompanying text noted that this picture was taken by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera, which is flying aboard a space weather monitoring satellite called the lying aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). The note went on to say that this little scamp is a million miles away orbiting at the L1 Lagrange Point.

Not surprisingly, Gina was interested to know what a Lagrange Point was. I think I first learned about this in Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein. The Lagrange Points are positions where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them. In fact there are five such points, called L1 through L5, in the Sun-Earth system.

I also ran across this very cool animation. When I saw this described as an animation, my knee-jerk reaction was that it was artificially generated. In fact, it's a series of real photographs that have been collected together to provide some semblance of motion.

Speaking of the dark side of the moon, as I've mentioned on previous occasions, I saw Pink Floyd play their Dark Side of the Moon live at an open air concert at Knebworth in 1975.

And, speaking of photographs, have you been looking at the incredible images of Pluto coming from the New Horizons space probe?

Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto (Photo: NASA).

 

By some strange quirk of fate, a few days ago I was chatting to the guy who designed the imaging sensor that was used to take these photographs. What do you think of the incredible "dark side of the moon" images discussed above?