Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve confused the data with the metadata.
metadata is actually a form of data, believe it or not.
The data’s data!
Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
71–80 of 228 posts
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#72I feel like the entire thread should have led off with "This is in fact a publicly known hangar in Palmdale and this was known as public information as soon as the unveiling event occurred, and thus this is just an exercise to show how locating the spot could have been possible from just this photo as a technical demonstration." Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news'…
I'm not so sure.
It is very interesting--and newsworthy--how difficult it is to be anonymous on the internet. Any person, place, or thing can be "doxxed" by seemingly innocuous background details.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#73Related unrelated question : how come this is public? F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities. I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc. Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there eno…
> Related unrelated question : how come this is public? Because trying to hide the existence of strategic bombers is expensive, ineffective, and not particularly helpful to keeping the actually secret technology they use secret. > F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational With the F-117, the shape was part of the secret sauce. The B-21 doesn’t seem to be a big departure that way. > I don't und…
> With the F-117, the shape was part of the secret sauce. The B-21 doesn’t seem to be a big departure that way.
The world has also changed substantially. When the F-117 was developed, being able to simulate the RF interactions with faceted geometry was ground breaking stuff. Now anyone that can afford an ANSYS license can simulate that with far, far, greater fidelity against much more complex shapes.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#74I mean, they livestreamed the rollout on YouTube on the Edward’s AFB YouTube channel and said it was at NG’s Palmdale facility (paraphrasing). I’m not sure any of this was a secret…
Not only that, they had three bombers (B1, B2, and B52) fly over during the live stream of the unveiling that could be tracked live on commercial flight tracking websites. This simply wasn’t a secret at all.
This livestream is the best caricature of American culture I've seen, thank you.
It is the unveiling of a bomber, with the national anthem sung by an employee of the company who built it, as in a proper performance, while more bombers fly ahead so loudly he has to stop. Then it proceeds to have the CEO read an engineered speech from a teleprompter, completely devoid of her own existence. Followed by a hollywood action movie style reveal, with the attendees going wild, clapping and shouting for the new, shiny bomber. It is a gift that keeps on giving.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope - years ago I accidentally discovered this while trying to align star images for stacking. Some of my images were taken in daylight, and I was surprised to find my rudimentary image aligner still worked just fine. Never wrote it up into a blog post.
Do you mind expanding a bit more ? Because I don't understand. Even if you have oversampling, as you say, it would be after you know the locations of the stars, and also, how can you brute force every possible right ascension/declination/rotation ? Without a calibrated camera how do you account for the distortions ? Thanks
In my case, I had nighttime images from the same camera, so all the calibration was already done... I was just looking for a rotated version of the nighttime image in the daytime image.
But even in the general case, smallish image patches don't have enough distortion to matter, while still having plenty of oversampling, and only have 3 unknowns. You can probably do some kind of fft trickery to reduce it to 1 unknown. And you can probably use some kind of hill-climbing to further reduce the search effort.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#76Related unrelated question : how come this is public? F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities. I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc. Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there eno…
There's of course the slightly conspiratorial idea that they made this public because it's obsolete compared to whatever their newest toys are and so revealing this as a show of technological superiority is fine.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#77Wait, this didn’t even rely on the constellations though. Get the latitude from the North Star and then look for matching air bases.
I thought so too but I think you need to know the constellations first to identify the North Star in the photo.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#78It's worth noting that stars can be seen even in daylight with the right software. That's because, while no individual star is visible, the exact angles between all stars is fixed, so you can do a brute force search of all possible orientations of the sky to find a matching one. In a 6 megapixel image of half blue sky, you effectively get an oversampling ratio of 3 million:1, so even with very bright sunlight obscuri…
How long does this take? Could this be run on, say, a smartphone to calculate its rough position from a photo of the sky?
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#79Related unrelated question : how come this is public? F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities. I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc. Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there eno…
it may be its operational capabilities are more important to keep secret. It has an unmanned mode which is very interesting to me. Does it need to be piloted by a guy in an office cube like the Predator drone or is it more autonomous?
> It has an unmanned mode
Maybe. “Designed to accommodate unmannef operations” is... fairly vague as a description.
Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did mention this later in the thread - was just a fun experiment to see if locating it was possible if we didn't know
Sure, but the reason you didn't lead with that, and also the reason you did this for a secretive aircraft and not a new campervan is clicks, no?
Even if he did do this for the clicks, so what?