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Amateurs Beat Space Agencies To Titan Pictures
loconet writes "Nature.com is reporting that a group of enthusiastic amateurs managed to process raw images of Titan from the Huygens probe faster that any of the giant space agencies in charge of the mission. Terragen, a freeware program that converts the basic brightness data in aerial pictures into a topographical map, to generate the ground-level vista was used."
I've been using it for some years now. It is surprisingly easy to load these grayscale images in a heigh-maps and get an accurate render. I'm kicking myself now for not thinking of doing the same thing!
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
The coolest thing I have seen from the great site gathering these open images (link in article) is a poster combinging and tying together all of the pictures seen so far here.
.Mac account so it will hold up to load (I just hope it's not locked).
It's 2MB and I wouldn't nromally link to something that big on Slashdot, but it's very cool and held in a
It shows a picture of Titan, and the square from that that represents a blow-up of a small section, then links a part of that to the aerial view displaying the "rivers", then from that to the side view from above showing the shore, then shows in there where the landing site is and the picture from that.
Enjoy!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Liekens does caution that not all of the pictures will be scientifically reliable, something that ESA and NASA obviously have to take care over."
I had a website for a text based RPG a long time ago. My website was considered the best for accurate information that came up quickly. The reason - whenever the administrators for the professional companies website needed an addition to the web page - they had to wait for the IT department to fulfill the order (they had other projects too).
:)
So large organizations suffer from that, especially government ones. The good thing is though, the organizations tend to have better resources, so while not always true, they generally produce a better end result. (bring on the flame war on how i am wrong).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
you mean
http://anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html
If you read anything to do with these pictures, you'd know (because it's plastered all over the article) that the creators of these pictures have stated repeatedly that they aren't intended to be viewed as scientifically accurate, but rather a preliminary look at the surface of Titan, with inaccurate colors. No one is trying to pass this off as final processed images, and no one is claiming that these guys did as good or better than what the space agencies will produce. The idea is to get a first look at processed images, as a preview of what is to come. These aren't illustrations, they're based on the actual raw image data. Further, they didn't use Photoshop, they used Terragen. They didn't apply any new textures, they applied false colors, and STATED that the colors were innacurate. The terrain is based on the raw image data, and while it is likely not 100% accurate, it is approximate. I also am excited to see the final processed images, but you need to get your information straight before you bash the work of talented amateurs.
Well..uh...I do believe that the Cassini-Huygens launch date was back in 1997 so I thikn we can forgive them for not using 5 megapixel cameras on the probe seeing as how they didn't exist
Except these people don't. From this page:
While Huygens rests frozen at -180 degrees Celsius on Titan's landscape, a symbolic finale to the engineering and flight phase of this historic mission, scientists have taken little time off to eat or sleep.
They have been processing, examining and analysing data, and sometimes even dreaming about it when they sleep. There's enough data to keep Huygens scientists busy for months and even years to come.
I want to reiterate/emphasize an earlier comment...
This data requires calibration to transform it to usable data. Sure these look nice, but what are the *real* colors/greyscale/temperature/etc. that these images depict?
That said, I look at a lot of uncalibrated imagery and it's often fine to the naked eye. Since that's really the only use for these particular images, it's nice that they're out. Just do not mistake this for real scientific data -- or even accurate imagery -- at best it's a reasonable approximation.
But damn, the ESA is slow at getting stuff out. NASA has done a MUCH better job at releasing Cassini images... the ESA works at a snails pace by comparison.
-Pie
They're not 'processed' at all. All they did was take a greyscale image and derive a heightfield from it, then render it using guessed at 'Titan-like' atmosphere parameters. Terragen is a great piece of software, but they could just as easily have rendered your back garden pond with similar results or rendered the Titan data and made it look like the south pacific. In fact one of the most effective uses I've seen made of Terragen is to render Martian data as a Terraformed surface.
Here are all of the processed pictures from the leikens site, without bothering to properly mirror the site. They don't allow deep linking, so here you can play with just the images. For proper credits see the liekens site.
See, for example, these field test photos of the camera in the Arizona area. as they say:
To construct any of these projections, the direction of every pixel in each of the three imagers was measured and expressed as a nadir and azimuth angle in a spherical coordinate system centered on the imager in question. Parallax due to coordinate center offsets was ignored. The distortion due to the optical systems was removed using an empirically-derived unwarping function. The images were projected onto a mosaicking plane using one of several projection algorithms (mercator, conic, stereographic or gnomonic) defined below, causing the various images to be spliced together.)
oooooooo.... Pictures.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It is very cool to see that this has been written up in Nature, however I'm a bit disparaged by the fact that the chat room that is mentioned here is not mentioned by name.
:)). If you happen to drop by, I go by JPL-Justin in channel - say hello!
If you would like to meet some of the folks who do this sort of thing, you should stop by #space on irc.freenode.net. #space is an unofficial channel for discussion of space-related science, exploration, and events.
I've been around the channel since it split from #maestro, (a community of space enthusiasts who use the NASA Maestro program) and it is an exciting place to hang out during a space event.
I would also like to note that I presented the Huygens imagery last friday afternoon to 100+ community members at Cornell University. Despite the fact that Cornell has many scientists on the Cassini mission, the #space channel was by far the fastest way to get the newly released data. If it was out on the net to be found - someone in there would find it.
If you're interested in space it's a great place to go to answer questions or just to chat (flame wars about policy are kept in #space_politics
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Actualy, yes. I was hanging around in #space on freenode when this was happening. If you know the height the pictures were taken at, you can compute the curve of the section you are trying map your images onto. From there, it's just matching lines and projecting onto a curved surface that matches what'd you'd be seeing at that height. It's slightly more complicated than just stitching the pictures together, but it yeilds a LOT better of a result.
stuff
Actually working on X-ray astronomy for many years, I thought I'd comment on your point. Any imaging CCD usually does not pick up wavelength of light outside of the band in which it's designed to observe. Be it through the materials used in the construction of the CCD, the filter placed in front of it, or the mirrors used to direct light. This is done to eliminate any possibility of un-intended consequences (for instance mirrors used to funnel X-rays to a CCD are often quite good at funneling high energy protons as well, which usually cause a bit of damage.) and to eliminate as much uncertainty and error in the system.
And while I agree with your comment, that most pictures released by astronomers are simply meant to WOW the audience, when images of non-visible wavelengths are given false colors, no data is lost from that specturm. (Unless we're talking about a broad band imaging from multiple observatories... but that's a different subject)
The images scientists actually care about usuaully contain too much information for a 2-D colorized representation and are not very useful on paper.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time