Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby smoking since 1879 » Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:55 pm

Image
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
smoking since 1879
 
Posts: 509
Joined: Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: CZ
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby smoking since 1879 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 8:39 am

gotanotheroneforya...

Image

regarding the OP :

one could indeed consider the universe to be bland
alternatively, one could lament our crude mammalian visual system

your call

a wise man once said:
"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
smoking since 1879
 
Posts: 509
Joined: Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: CZ
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby brekin » Fri Apr 29, 2016 12:07 pm

Three more stories discussing NASA's Space Cottingley Fairy Photography process.

But first a song to get you in the mood:



"Blind"

Signs
Signs are lost
Signs disappeared
Turn invisible
Got no sign
Somebody got busted
Got a face of stone
And a ghostwritten biography
Dogs start to run in,
Hungry for some food
Dogs start a-twitching
And they're looking at you
It was light
By five
Torn all apart
All in the name of democracy
He's hurt
He's dying
Claimed he was a terrorist
Claimed to avert a catastrophe
Someone should'a told him
That the buck stops here
No one ever said
That he was involved with thieves
And they're blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind

No sense of harmony, No sense of
time, Don't mention harmony, Say:
What is it? What is it? What is it? Give
a little shock, and he raises his hand
Somebody shouts out, says: What is
it? What is it? What is it?
He was shot down in the night! Peop-
ple ride by but his body's still alive
The girl in the window what has she
done? She looks down at me ...
says: "I don't want to die!"

And I'm blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
Somebody could have told us where they go
Crawling all around looking for foot, foot, footprints
Now tell me what the Hell have we become?
Some dirty little bastards What the Hell is going on?u
No sense of harmony, No sense of
time, Don't mention harmony, Say:
What is it? What is it? What is it? Give
a little shock, and he raises his hand
Somebody shouts out, says: What is
it? What is it? What is it?
He was shot down in the night! Peop-
ple ride by but his body's still alive
The girl in the window what has she
done? She looks down at me ...
says: "I don't want to die!"

They're blind and they're blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind
blind, blind
blind, blind, blind, blind, blind


TRUE OR FALSE (COLOR): THE ART OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY

1 Oct , 2007 by Nancy Atkinson
When you look at the amazing pictures captured by Hubble, or the Mars Exploration Rovers, do you ever wonder: is that what you’d really see with your own eyes? The answer, sadly, is probably not. In some cases, such as with the Mars rovers, scientists try and calibrate the rovers to see in “true color,” but mostly, colors are chosen to yield the most science. Here’s how scientists calibrate their amazing instruments, and the difference between true and false colors.

So, to start off, let’s put this in the form of a true or false question: T or F: When we see the gorgeous, iconic images from the Hubble Space Telescope or the stunning panoramas from the Mars Exploration Rovers, those pictures represent what human eyes would see if they observed those vistas first hand.

Answer: For the Hubble, mostly false. For the rovers, mostly true, as the rovers provide a combination of so-called “true” and “false” color images. But, it turns out, the term “true color” is a bit controversial, and many involved in the field of extraterrestrial imaging are not very fond of it.


“We actually try to avoid the term ‘true color’ because nobody really knows precisely what the ‘truth’ is on Mars,” said Jim Bell, the lead scientist for the Pancam color imaging system on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). In fact, Bell pointed out, on Mars, as well as Earth, color changes all the time: whether it’s cloudy or clear, the sun is high or low, or if there are variations in how much dust is in the atmosphere. “Colors change from moment to moment. It’s a dynamic thing. We try not to draw the line that hard by saying ‘this is the truth!'”

Bell likes to use the term “approximate true color” because the MER panoramic camera images are estimates of what humans would see if they were on Mars. Other colleagues, Bell said, use “natural color.”

Zolt Levay of the Space Telescope Science Institute produces images from the Hubble Space Telescope. For the prepared Hubble images, Levay prefers the term “representative color.”

“The colors in Hubble images are neither ‘true’ colors nor ‘false’ colors, but usually are representative of the physical processes underlying the subjects of the images,” he said. “They are a way to represent in a single image as much information as possible that’s available in the data.”

True color would be an attempt to reproduce visually accurate color. False color, on the other hand, is an arbitrary selection of colors to represent some characteristic in the image, such as chemical composition, velocity, or distance. Additionally, by definition, any infrared or ultraviolet image would need to be represented with “false color” since those wavelengths are invisible to humans.

The cameras on Hubble and MER do not take color pictures, however. Color images from both spacecraft are assembled from separate black & white images taken through color filters. For one image, the spacecraft have to take three pictures, usually through a red, a green, and a blue filter and then each of those photos gets downlinked to Earth. They are then combined with software into a color image. This happens automatically inside off-the-shelf color cameras that we use here on Earth. But the MER Pancams have 8 different color filters while Hubble has almost 40, ranging from ultraviolet (“bluer” than our eyes can see,) through the visible spectrum, to infrared (“redder” than what is visible to humans.) This gives the imaging teams infinitely more flexibility and sometimes, artistic license. Depending on which filters are used, the color can be closer or farther from “reality.”

http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true ... otography/

How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?
Photoshop, of course.


A picture taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope was released on Monday; the image, which depicts the birth of 100,000 stars in a far-away gas cloud, shows a splotchy shape in light red, set against a background of speckled blue-white stars and olive mist. How do these photographs get to be so pretty?
Teams of specialists on the ground gussy them up for public consumption. Here's how it works: Telescopes like the Spitzer and the Hubble take black-and-white pictures using different filters to capture particular wavelengths of light.
(The image released this week is a composite created from four shots of the same thing.) Then these pictures are sent back to Earth via the Deep Space Network, a set of large antennae set up around the world.

For the Hubble telescope, the image files can be up to 70MB in size, with a resolution of 16.7 megapixels. Data is downloaded from the telescope at a speed comparable to that of a good Internet connection.
Once the images are on the ground, scientists can look at them in the FITS ("Flexible Image Transport System") file format, a standard protocol used among astronomers. For analysis, most scientists use the data in this form—as grey-scale images representing light at different wavelengths.
To create an image suitable for public viewing, the scientists send the FITS files over to a public outreach team. Specialists on the team—who tend to be astronomers with graduate degrees and a passion for graphics and photography—begin the process of converting the information into the images sent out in press releases.

First, they put the image into a file format appropriate for media. That means that the data from the FITS files, which show a range of about 65,000 shades of grey, must be squeezed into a standard JPEG or TIFF file, with only 256 shades. This process is counterintuitively called "stretching" the data and must be done carefully to preserve important features and enhance details in the finished product.

Then each grey-scale image is assigned a color. In reality, each shot already represents a color—the wavelength of light captured by the filter when that picture was taken. But in some cases the images represent colors that we wouldn't be able to see. (The Spitzer, for example, registers the infrared spectrum.) To create a composite image that has the full range of colors seen by the human eye, an astronomer picks one image and makes it red, picks another and makes it blue, and completes the set by coloring a third image green. When he overlays the three images, one on top of the other, they produce a full-color picture. (Televisions and computer monitors create color in the same way.)

Sometimes the team assigns new colors even when the original pictures were taken in the visible spectrum. An object that would in real life comprise several indistinguishable shades of red might be represented to the public as the composite of three pictures in red, green, and blue. As a general rule, professional "visualizers" try to assign red to the image showing the longest wavelengths of light and blue to the one showing the shortest. (This parallels the relationship among the colors in the visible spectrum.)

Finally, the colorized images are cropped, rotated to the most dramatic orientation, and cleaned of instrument errors and other unsightly blemishes. Most of this work is done in Photoshop, using a freely downloaded plug-in that allows users to convert from the FITS format. (The original telescope images are also available, so you can create your own color gas cloud picture at home.)

Space pictures weren't always so pretty. David Malin, a scientist at a telescope facility in Australia, did the pioneering work in color visualization more than 20 years ago. He figured out how to use black-and-white photographic film and color filters to create full-color visualizations. The modern master of the field is Zoltan Levay, who works on images sent down from the Hubble.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/09/how_do_space_pictures_get_so_pretty.html

Lots of Amazing Space Images Aren’t “Real,” but Maybe That’s OK

Like regular porn, spaceporn can be misleading.
Hey there! Pull up a chair—we need to have a talk. It’s about all those pictures in your browser history. We know what you’ve been looking at, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but we wanted to talk to you about how realistic it is and make sure you understand it’s not entirely accurate. Yes. We’re talking about your spaceporn.

Aside from the wonderful, more traditionally produced images that we’ve been getting from astronauts aboard the International Space Station, pretty much the best source of space imagery has long been the Hubble Space Telescope, so that’s the process we’ll use as an example. The Hubble launched in 1990 and has been bringing us beautiful images of space ever since, affectionately dubbed “spaceporn” by the Internet.
So what’s the difference that makes the images from the ISS more “traditional” than Hubble’s? Well, here’s NASA astronaut Don Pettit posing with the some of the cameras the astronauts use aboard the ISS:

You’ll notice that these cameras aren’t too different from what your aunt carries around at parties while you’re busy throwing Instagram filters on things on your phone. Meanwhile, every image that comes from the Hubble is a composite of several different black and white images from light sensitive instruments that are put together with filters of different colors applied to eventually come out with things that look like this:
Amazing, right? Each corner of the Universe is truly a beautiful and unique snowflake with untold visual wonders that would make Van Gogh weep.
Not so fast—let’s back up and first understand how that image was physically made.

When you look at a Hubble image, what you’re really seeing is a visualization of scientific data. Like computer monitors and TVs, Hubble images mimic the human eye’s red, green, and blue color receptors by combining those three colors to generate approximately 16.7 million individual color values—pretty much any color the human eye can see.This is done by breaking down the light coming into the telescope with color filters to produce black and white images. Like so:

Three different filters were used to capture small slivers of the visible light spectrum by Hubble’s imaging equipment in black and white representations of light and dark within each filter’s range of light wavelengths. Then, the red, green, and blue colors were assigned by a technician in imaging software after the fact. As you can see, green visible light was assigned a blue hue, while two sections of red light were assigned green and red.
Here, take a time-lapse peek behind the curtain at how an even more complicated link of delicious space-sausage is made (with a genius choice of music accompaniment):
But let’s get back to that image of the Eagle Nebula and why the technician would pick out specific colors of visible light and make them the wrong colors. In this case, the colors were chosen to bring out a higher level of detail in the image:

These color reassignments enhance the level of detail visible in the image, because otherwise the red light from hydrogen and that from sulfur would be hard to tell apart. In the final image, the blue-green haze indicates light from hydrogen and oxygen surrounding the dark columns. The columns display reddish highlights identifying light from sulfur.
So the image above isn’t necessarily what we’d see if we passed by that region of space in a TARDIS spaceship, as Hubble’s website points out:
The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren’t always what we’d see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object’s detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.

We use color:
To depict how an object might look to us if our eyes were as powerful as Hubble
To visualize features of an object that would ordinarily be invisible to the human eye
To bring out an object’s subtle details.

In the latter two cases, the coloring is a judgment call by the person putting the image together, and it’s just as much an art as it is science.
Yes, some of the amazing space images you’ve been salivating over are of things you wouldn’t actually even be able to see with your own eyes. Hubble sometimes uses its filters to capture ultraviolet and infrared light, which human beings can’t see at all. Here’s a picture of something that, to our eyes, looks much different:

The color image of the Egg Nebula on the right is made entirely from different sections of the infrared light spectrum reassigned to red, green, and blue in the same way as the Eagle Nebula’s visible light. The left hand side is a visible light representation of the same image, which just appears bright and blue to the human eye. The image on the right is certainly more useful to science, but it paints a confusing picture of what the Universe looks like.

But wait! Before you go storming off thinking everything you know is a lie, demanding your tax dollars back from NASA, or some third perfectly reasonable reaction to these methods, take a minute to consider that for all its complicated processes, this isn’t as different from traditional photography as it sounds.
All photography is a representation of data taken in by the camera’s lens, and none of it can ever truly look exactly the same as human beings see it with their eyes. Incidentally, that’s kind of why I fly into a blind rage when people assume that an Instagram pic without a filter or a photo untouched by Photoshop is automatically more realistic—sometimes, cameras do a poor job of capturing the way things actually look.

It’s even true of the most ancient and derelict of photographic techniques: film. Even when developing a black and white picture in the dark ages in a darkroom, the contrast and brightness is all up to the photographer and even depends on the kind of photo paper used. Photographs made using the same exact negative can look drastically different depending on how they’re developed.
We often forget this, because for most people, the process is automatic and no longer done by hand. When you take a digital photo with your phone, its image sensors and software work together to produce an image that it thinks is closest to what you wanted, but making adjustments afterwards can often get you a closer representation of what you actually saw. Whenever you last took film to a 1-hour photo to get it developed, the settings on their developing machines affected how your pictures came out in ways you might not even have noticed.

So does the Universe always look exactly like what we see when a new Hubble image is released? Not to us, no, but it’s still a very real representation of what’s out there all the same. Remember, we humans don’t even have exceptionally good color vision. Maybe the Hubble’s images are intended to be viewed by our eventual overlords the mantis shrimp, which can see several types of light that humans can’t and will one day punch us into submission.

But again, not all images of space are made this way. It just takes really sophisticated equipment to get images of things that are so far away, which is usually left to scientists and rarely for commercial purposes. Our Universe is still a beautiful place, and here’s some proof with a jaw-dropping Vine from the ISS:

So go ahead. Explore your spaceporn curiosities, but keep your expectations in check. When you see a picture, take a minute to track it back to its original posting and read the caption to find out just what it is you’re seeing depicted by the colors in the images. That way, you’ll get an even deeper appreciation for all the amazing things that are out there in the Universe.
(video and all spaceporn images via NASA)

http://www.themarysue.com/how-space-images-are-made/
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby smoking since 1879 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 1:49 pm

TLDR;

except:
So go ahead. Explore your spaceporn curiosities, but keep your expectations in check. When you see a picture, take a minute to track it back to its original posting and read the caption to find out just what it is you’re seeing depicted by the colors in the images. That way, you’ll get an even deeper appreciation for all the amazing things that are out there in the Universe.


yes, agreed

though i'm wondering what expectations the author is referring to
are space tourists going to be so underwhelmed that they demand their money back?

gee, i guess i'll hold off buying that ticket after all

:clown
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
smoking since 1879
 
Posts: 509
Joined: Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: CZ
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Apr 29, 2016 5:19 pm

Today's NASA photo of the day, the James Webb telescope's golden mirror.

Image

Read more:
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/james-webb-space-telescopes-golden-mirror
User avatar
Iamwhomiam
 
Posts: 6572
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2007 2:47 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby brekin » Fri Apr 29, 2016 5:46 pm

From a review of the book mentioned before Picturing the Cosmos.

...
Art historian Elizabeth Kessler examines how these images are created, and their artistic and other significance, in her book Picturing the Cosmos. Many astronomers, she writes, look down on these publicly released images, such as those from the Hubble Heritage Project, as little more than “pretty pictures” with no scientific importance. Yet, clearly, they have a strong impression on the public, and perhaps a deeper significance as well.

Kessler examined how some of these Hubble images are created, a process that is both an art and a science. The raw images returned by Hubble are not visually appealing: grayscale images with cosmic rays and other artifacts. Astronomers, such as those working on the Hubble Heritage Project, go through a lengthy process to clean up the images and combine images taken at different wavelengths to create the stunning color images that are released, like the Horsehead Nebula images released by NASA last week to commemorate the telescope’s launch anniversary. But this scientific process is not without a human, artistic touch: one astronomer tells Kessler they tweak the colors they apply to the images so that things “look right” from their perspective. “And what exactly looks right is maybe a little hard to quantify,” he admits. In one case, he said, they applied some “wild colors” like pink and yellow to a nebula, only to go back to a more “classic” palette because it “somehow just didn’t feel right for us.”
....
So, do such images explain the public’s love of Hubble? Kessler notes that there was a significant change in how the Space Telescope Science Institute presented images from Hubble starting in 1995, with the release of the so-called “Pillars of Creation” image of the Eagle Nebula, which had a strong, positive reaction from the public. Color images soon became the norm, which “signaled the greater attention paid to creating visually appealing images,” she writes.

Yet, Hubble doesn’t have a unique ability to make color images. And while its location above the atmosphere allows it to observe the universe in great detail, larger terrestrial telescopes equipped with adaptive optics that correct for the blurring of light as it passes through the atmosphere can do just a good as job, if not better, in many cases. However, the public doesn’t fawn over images from the Keck Observatory or the Very Large Telescope in the same way as it does Hubble. [b]Cynics might argue, and underdstandably so, that Hubble has the support of a powerful NASA public relations machine that most terrestrial telescopes lack. Or, perhaps, the public has identified with and even anthropomorphized Hubble as it has with some other robotic spacecraft, particularly as it has survived near-death experiences and rallied to provide useful science—even if the public struggles to understand exactly what that science is. In this case, the images from Hubble are an essential, but perhaps alone not sufficient, explanation for the public’s support of this venerable space telescope.[/b]

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2280/1

Just imagine the strong public reaction when they start adding in kittens.

Image
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Apr 29, 2016 7:04 pm

I was once walking to the movies through my neighborhood with two friends. It had just stormed a heavy summer thunderstorm and so, while the sun was setting, the clouds above were those heavy blue-black things. Everything was bathed in the reddish orange of the sunset shining through this narrow layer of atmosphere between the earth and the low stormcloud.

We passed some flowers along the sidewalk. They were probably a pretty bright pink in normal conditions, but in the crazy orange light they looked like some color we weren't allowed to see (and I said as much). It was like some crazy ultraviolet. It actually hurt to look at.

I'm sure I wasn't seeing outside of the visible spectrum but I think of it often as an example of what that might be like. I felt like I was shrooming.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby maco144 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 7:22 pm

It is readily apparent to anyone who chooses to watch videos of stars recorded by cameras capable of 60x+ zoom that the stars we are told in the sky are vastly different from what we've been told. No wonder NASA has to photoshop the lies coming out of its mouth about what Hubble claims to see.
maco144
 
Posts: 128
Joined: Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby Sounder » Fri Apr 29, 2016 7:40 pm

the stars we are told in the sky are vastly different from what we've been told.


Pray tell, how so.

And welcome Mako
Sounder
 
Posts: 4054
Joined: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby 82_28 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:18 pm

Man I swear this place is like checking the cushions for change. Welcome, Maco!

However back to subject. I was hella amazed that Pluto got that much light when the spacecraft Horizons flew by. I was really hoping it wouldn't be a flyby but could have somehow orbited. But at that trajectory, speed and given technology would have been impossible. It took 9 years to go from Earth to Pluto!
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
User avatar
82_28
 
Posts: 11194
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 4:34 am
Location: North of Queen Anne
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby brekin » Mon May 02, 2016 5:39 pm

A interesting timeline patched together from different sources. One could understand the need to wow the public after four years and millions of dollars trying to fix an expensive and embarrassing mistake.

The Hubble space telescope: 'It's a terrific comeback story'
It’s 25 years since a shuttle first put the giant space telescope into orbit, but the project initially seemed doomed to fail. How did Nasa’s team turn things around, going on to capture over a million stunning images of deep space?
It was May 1990 and the $1.5bn Hubble had been in orbit for a month. In the room at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, everyone stared at the image.“Some eyebrows went up,” says David Leckrone, a senior scientist who worked on Hubble from 1976 until his retirement in 2009. “It was supposed to be a picture of a binary star, a pair of stars. But it was just sort of a fuzzy blur.” Someone piped up: “It’s OK, isn’t it? That’s how it’s supposed to look?” Those in the know drew breath. That was not how it was supposed to look.
....
The space shuttle flew its first service mission to Hubble in 1993. The crew replaced the telescope’s main camera with Trauger’s modified version, and fitted a second device to correct Hubble’s other scientific instruments. Back on Earth, the team pointed the telescope at a patch of space strewn with stars and waited for pictures.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/23/the-hubble-space-telescope-its-a-terrific-comeback-story

On January 13, 1994, NASA declared the mission a complete success and showed the first sharper images.[75] At the time, the mission was one of the most complex, involving five long extra-vehicular activity periods. Its success was a boon for NASA, as well as for the astronomers with a more capable space telescope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope

Kessler notes that there was a significant change in how the Space Telescope Science Institute presented images from Hubble starting in 1995, with the release of the so-called “Pillars of Creation” image of the Eagle Nebula, which had a strong, positive reaction from the public. Color images soon became the norm, which “signaled the greater attention paid to creating visually appealing images,” she writes.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2280/1
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon May 02, 2016 5:48 pm

^^^^ Ha! That was no where near as bad as the engineer who used feet as a measurement instead of metric measurement and wasted years and many millions when is crashed into Mars.
User avatar
Iamwhomiam
 
Posts: 6572
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2007 2:47 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby 82_28 » Mon May 02, 2016 8:55 pm

Yeah that was a good (read bad) one. What a simple mistake that SHOULD have been easily detected.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
User avatar
82_28
 
Posts: 11194
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 4:34 am
Location: North of Queen Anne
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby brekin » Wed May 04, 2016 12:19 pm

False Color

False color (or false colour) refers to a group of color rendering methods used to display images in color which were recorded in the visible or non-visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. A false-color image is an image that depicts an object in colors that differ from those a photograph (a "true-color" image) would show.

In addition, variants of false color such as pseudocolor (see discussion), density slicing (see discussion), and choropleths (see discussion) are used for information visualization of either data gathered by a single grayscale channel or data not depicting parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. elevation in relief maps or tissue types in magnetic resonance imaging).

"True-color"
To understand false color, a look at the concept behind true color is helpful. An image is called a "true-color" image when it offers a natural color rendition, or when it comes close to it. This means that the colors of an object in an image appear to a human observer the same way as if this observer were to directly view the object: A green tree appears green in the image, a red apple red, a blue sky blue, and so on.[1] When applied to black-and-white images, true-color means that the perceived lightness of a subject is preserved in its depiction.

...
False color is used (among others) for satellite and space images: Examples are remote sensing satellites (e.g. Landsat, see example above), space telescopes (e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope) or space probes (e.g. Cassini-Huygens). Some spacecraft, with rovers (e.g. the Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity") being the most prominent examples, have the ability to capture approximate true-color images as well.[3] Weather satellites produce, in contrast the spacecrafts mentioned previously, grayscale images from the visible or infrared spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color

Image

If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Universe more bland than thought?: Hubble Photos

Postby coffin_dodger » Wed May 04, 2016 12:24 pm

User avatar
coffin_dodger
 
Posts: 2216
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:05 am
Location: UK
Blog: View Blog (14)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests