View from the surface of a comet

April 25, 2018 9:59 PM

You may recall that a little over three years ago the Rosetta mission landed its Philae lander on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Two days ago Twitter user landru79 aligned and stacked long-exposure photographs taken by the lander to create a short stunning movie of the view from the surface of the comet. They followed up yesterday with an image-stabilized version.

The Rosetta mission, Philae lander and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko previously on MetaFilter.

posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (20 comments total)

This animation is ridiculous. I don't even have the words, my understanding of what the space people can do was instantly outstripped as soon as I saw it. The number of steps involved in this is just mind-boggling. Maybe I'm finally old, but holy shit, my niece and nephew are going to see some amazing space stuff in their lives.
posted by rhizome at 10:03 PM on April 25, 2018 [11 favorites]

Hadn’t seen the stabilized version, that’s awesome.
posted by Artw at 10:19 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

Not everything about living in Hell Future is bad! This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:31 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

I like the unstabilized image, with countless blazing stars wheeling in the background. Amazing!
posted by JamesBay at 10:46 PM on April 25, 2018 [8 favorites]

It's definitely amazing, but it also feels like something out of a half-remembered nightmare. Reminds me of that heavily-redacted passage from House of Leaves where samples from the labyrinth are compared to comets in being billions of years old, with materials foreign not just to Earth, but to the Solar System. There's something vaguely unsettling about seeing such an utterly ancient and alien landscape cartwheeling silently through the stars like some Lynchian claymation or Lumière brothers found footage.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:47 PM on April 25, 2018 [14 favorites]

I'm slightly disappointed that there don't appear to be any Lovecraftian horrors.

It does seem like the kind of place where they'd feel right at home, though.
posted by MrVisible at 11:19 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

The colour images from this user are great too - comets aren't grey!
posted by firesine at 11:45 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

They followed up yesterday with an

enormous cat! Oh.

But this is cool, too. It feels like cut footage from Le Voyage dans la Lune.
posted by pracowity at 11:48 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm slightly disappointed that there don't appear to be any Lovecraftian horrors.

Pretty sure there's the shadow of something huge and horrible looming over the cliff at the end of the loop
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 11:53 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]

Striking indeed, but after the false color controversies of the past, perhaps it's best to surface any potential "false time" claims before they fester.

"The video is significantly sped up, compressing 25 minutes into a few seconds of intense action." -via boingboing.net
posted by fairmettle at 1:00 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

that is truly awesome. but then again, space photos like this always remind me that the earth, this tiny little rock that seems so familiar and well trod, is itself fully a quarter the age of the entire universe, give or take an eon, and just as foreign in its ancientness as that comet..... and on an even more basic level, everything in the universe is equally old in terms of its fundamental component parts.
everything is everything, i guess.
posted by wibari at 1:41 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

“View from the surface of a comet” not fiction. Extraordinary.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:28 AM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

I can't stop looking at it.
posted by 4ster at 4:33 AM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's all the 😍 emojis that make this user's Twitter stream so pure and good.
posted by Rock Steady at 4:33 AM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

According to Ars, the images were taken by the Rosetta orbiter and not the Philae lander.
posted by fremen at 7:06 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

"The video is significantly sped up, compressing 25 minutes into a few seconds of intense action."

I don't care!

According to Ars, the images were taken by the Rosetta orbiter and not the Philae lander

I don't care!

I'm slightly disappointed that there don't appear to be any Lovecraftian horrors.

I feel this is a decent companion piece to tide us over until the residents of 67P reveal themselves.
posted by rhizome at 9:03 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm slightly disappointed that there don't appear to be any Lovecraftian horrors.

Nope, sorry, all the horrors are here on Earth. And human.

There's plenty of weirdness out there, without needing to project our fears into it.
posted by happyroach at 11:40 AM on April 26, 2018

This animation is just so amazing. It really emphasizes the impact of moving pictures on our monkey brains. Any single frame of this by itself is kind of interesting, but takes some interpretation. So cool.
posted by kokogiak at 1:19 PM on April 26, 2018

It's more amazing each time I look at it. It reminds me a little bit of a real-time feed from ISS I saw a while ago, but with like 1,000,000x the awesomeness.
posted by Gorgik at 2:06 PM on April 26, 2018

LOOK AT THE VELOCITY OF THAT THING. It's like rolling down a park hill while drunk.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:55 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]