NASA, Give Me a Break. Earth Photos are Way Cooler.

NASA, Give Me a Break. Earth Photos are Way Cooler.

For the past 30 days NASA spammed the Internet with Panoramas or regular format pictures from Mars. Any news site I read features new photos from Curiosity every 2 days, 20% of the tweets on my feed are related to photos from Mars. Yeah, Its awesome to see photos from other planets around us, but to be honest? Earth photos are way cooler. Even the most boring spots on earth gives us super interesting shots. Check out these great finds from Flickr - and wake me up when we land on Saturn.


"Dance of Light and Sand" Colorado~Dunes~National Park~Landscape~Photography
Photo: Dan Ballard.

the truth is out there
Photo: Eric.

desert
Photo: Majed Ali.

oneiro
Photo: Nir Ben-Yosef / XNIR.

Zabriskie Point Sunrise - Death Valley
Photo: Stephen Oachs.

Dead Tree
Photo: Mike Jones.

sierra colorada
Photo: p.f.o.l.k.

Voyage au Chili, en avion vers l'Atacama ~ Trip in Chile, in a plane to Atacama
Photo: David Rombaut.

Planet Texel
Photo: Ben Thé Man.

As seen through black and white.
Photo: Gabe Farnsworth.

simply milky way
Photo: Eric.

Palouse Falls Night
Photo: Ben Canales.

Double Arch with a Perseid Meteor and the Milky Way
Photo: Thomas O'brien.

The Red Moon !
Photo: Bashar Shglila.

AFRICA
Photo: Hamad Darwish.

"Mesa Arch" Utah~Sunrise~Light~Canyonlands~National Park
Photo: Dan Ballard .

Untitled
Photo: Ali Shokri.

Noam Galai's picture

Noam Galai is a Senior Fstoppers Staff Writer and NYC Celebrity / Entertainment photographer. Noam's work appears on publications such as Time Magazine, New York Times, People Magazine, Vogue and Us Weekly on a daily basis.

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23 Comments

Our little planet is not so bad in the end....

Chapeau! Awesome selection!! 8-)

All post-processed to hell and back.

Why? Because earth photos are boring and people need to alter them to make them interesting.

 no just because Nature is too big for our DSLR in one only shot ;)

Agreed good sir.

I think we're missing the point. We're taking pictures from Mars people!!
 

"Give Me a Break" ..... ?
Erm - haven't you (fstoppers) recently posted a few sets of Mars/shuttle photos.

"Yeah, Its awesome to see photos from other stars around us" must be a typo, but Mars is a planet. One that they suspect had life before us.
And sorry but Mars pictures are cooler than ANY pictures from earth. Not better photography for sure, but to think of what it took to take pictures of planets (and stars ;) ) so far away we can't even dream of getting there... is mind blowing. a different cool! ;)

Mars is a planet. 

as awesome as the earth photos are

mars pictures are by far cooler due to the fact it's a completely different planet.but good article to stir up some debate

We have first, learn how to love (sincerely) our home ... Earth. 
After that, we will be able to appreciate a bunch of rocks and mountains of NOTHING ... and red.  DUH.  

You've got to wonder about the youth of today after reading stories like this.. Even though I'm dating myself to the extreme here. Half the world stopped and sat to watch the first pictures from the Moon.. Here we've had an unmanned machine, travel since Nov 2011... Land, and really send back high res pictures of MARS, and the story tells the tale of how 'everyday and boring it all is'

It takes a lot to get today's people enthusiastic anymore.. What if you got to drive it from your iPad? Would that help you out? What if Kim Kardashian was flying it with her 2 ton butt? Seriously. If you're bored with all of this first time in history stuff... Unplug for a while and just walk away. And if you need a little more excitement and reality in your life, there's always your Xbox.

I was a little sarcastic of course :) no doubt its AMAZING what NASA did. its insane. crazy. But i found it interesting/funny/weird that everyone get so excited to see a place that looks pretty much like here, but usually dont really care about.... here. 

It's similar to a new parent who shares tons of photos of their child on Facebook—proudly sharing their joy with family and friends. NASA is enjoying an accomplished moment and they're simply sharing their joy and success with the rest of us. I personally enjoy looking at the photos of Mars, because I know I can never see Mars in person, but, can only imagine.

Now if they let Curiosity post directly to Facebook...we could see the aliens at the same time as the whole world! :D

Those are some stunning photos! But I have to say that photos from the surface of another planet are cool also!

What, no Ansel Adams? 

I can see photos of Earth any time I want by going to flickr, 500px, or by taking a plane along with my camera and capturing all the beauty. Nobody here would ever argue that Earth is beautiful and that a lot of skilled post-processing can make it even more stunning. However, I think that looking at the photo from another world for a few days or months is worth taking away your precious tweets about what is here all the time. So yes NASA, please take your time and increase the number of tweets, share all the photos that you have from that distant planet so that people here may actually realize there's more to life than which "celebrity" had a boob job, or which politician has tweeted themselves naked or which iCrap is being revealed by a fruit company. 

This... is... Earth - :) - http://500px.com/photo/1162779

i'm here just to observe... cool!

I think Noam is right in a sense here. You could take a picture of a patch of dust, and it would be awesome just because it's a patch of dust on Mars. The photos NASA has so far released have been amazing based on the context, not because of any inherent beauty.

That is what Earth has that Mars does not: Beauty that doesn't require context. While I only personally liked the first and last shots in this series, all of them were far more visually beautiful than anything taken on Mars. 

That being said, I'd stare at the dust twice as long than I did any picture in this series, but only because the context captures my imagination. If it was Nevada dust I wouldn't look twice. 

I concur, but that's only because Peter Lik hasn't landed on Mars yet :-)   Can't wait for my January trip out west to Arches, Bryce and Northern AZ.  Gonna be a blast with my new D800, 14-24 and Lee filter set!

Sorry, but Earth is WAY cooler!!

Gotta love the readers of fstoppers - taking everything way too seriously with no since of humour.