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Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to this page [0], which links to a broken link on NASA's site as source, it was "only" $720 million, not billions. I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well. In contrast, Facebook boug…
It's hard to agree on that, because I'm not a US citizen. Anyway what NASA / EU space programs are doing is far more significant for humanity ( IMHO ) than what Facebook Oculus and Snapchat are trying to achieve, so it looks really unfair.
On the other hand, I do sort of believe that the work that Oculus and other VR companies are doing is going to help the first manned mission to Mars keep from going insane.
Oh man, I would love to try VR in zero-G. I wonder if the visual ground reference would take over for the lack of vestibular ground reference? ZOMG! There is science to be done!
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#33If this is not astro picture of the year, I don't know what is: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...
It's a black and white photo of rocks and ice. It's interesting that it is Pluto, but photo of the year? Why?
Pluto is very small (radius 1,185 km), and very far away (about 7.5 billion km from Earth).
Being able to take a photograph of it is a significant achievement. Being able to show features of the landscape? It's amazing.
Here's a nice page that describes a demonstration of the distance to scale.
http://www.noao.edu/education/work/Peppercorn/Peppercorn_Mai...
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#34If this is not astro picture of the year, I don't know what is: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...
Simply breathtaking.
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#35Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#36After recovering from a moment of awe, I wonder why can't the photos be in color if it has full spectrum visible light sensors? From the description:
"Ralph consists of three panchromatic (black-and-white) and four color imagers inside its Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), as well as an infrared compositional mapping spectrometer called the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA)."
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#37These shots are outstanding, I can make out very familiar glacial features (carved by solid nitrogen!)
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually photos are evaluated not only for the reality that they've captured, but also how hard it was to take that photo. In the case of Pluto's high-resolution photos, there are maybe billion dollars behind it and hundreds of people that worked for years before actually the photo has been taken.
According to this page [0], which links to a broken link on NASA's site as source, it was "only" $720 million, not billions. I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well. In contrast, Facebook boug…
It is $720 million built on top of the shoulders of billions and billions of dollars of the failures and successes of missions that preceded it.
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This new view of Pluto’s crescent -- taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) Since this is a multispectral image it might not look like that to the human eye. I like this version better though!
Huh, I would have assumed that a multispectral camera would have (false) colors. What does that mean here? The frequency response of each pixel's light sensor has multiple peaks instead of a nice 'bell curve' shape?
'False color' is a post processing step. It doesn't matter what your source of the signal is, at some step when you make the image ready for human consumption (especially for web consumption), you get to decide how to map each of your channels to RGB (or whatever). When your sensors are RGB, then mapping directly to RGB makes sense. But you could swap green and red, and end up with a 'False Color'.
Remember, within each channel (doesn't matter how broad its frequency sensitivity is), the values you get are 'grayscale'.
Its perfectly legitimate to take multi sprectral data and collapse it down to gray scale (this is after all how we fake grayscale pictures taken on most digital cameras now).
Re: Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama
#40For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404
"This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective."
The video is 45 minutes long and makes it just past Jupiter. It would have to be 5.5 hours long to show Pluto.