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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."
Of all these pieces, I like Christian Waldvogel landscape the best:
i ta n_panorama_colored.jpg
http://www.lupomesky.cz/mirror/aliekens-titan/t
It's very evocative. Here's this probe from one world, landing on another, and what does it see?
A shoreline!
What a wonderful throwback to the age of exploration here on earth.
Stefan
Much larger images than on the nature.com page:
http://anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html/
Enjoy!
Another poster has already mentioned the quality control dangers in this 'free for all' approach, but so long as the tools and processes used are documented, experts can check things out after the fact, and the early "rushes" can always be corrected if QA does slip.
All in all there is surely plenty of scope for 'distributed contribution' in this arena. SETI@Home is an obvious example but this shows it doesn't necessarily have to be so formalised/organised.
OK, your post was funny and I laughed along with it. In all seriousness, though, I'd be perfectly happy to see "Fly Virgin" or "British Airways" or "JetBlue" on it, because that would mean that private industry has finally taken a serious interest in getting man off this rock. Go, Mr. Branson, GO!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Of course, I'd be even more excited if a trusted authority (such as NASA) were to release trustworthy images such as this. Not "that could be there", but "that is there"! Still, the raw data which is available is (presumably) trustworthy, so the images which have been produced ought to at least be indicative of the true state of affiars there.
I have two questions -- first, is an accurate photographic representation of this vista in our future? and second, what are the conditions there (temperature, atmospheric pressure and composition, windspeed, etc.)?
Yeah! I mean, I'm sure that these people made sure that their images were all pieced together at the proper angles and scaled properly (since they were snapped at different times) so as not to produce a wildly inaccurate rendering of the scene.
(/sarcasm)
Jesus: "Son of a
NASA could not endorse such a project.
Is that life??? Nope. Just a JPEG artifact.
And don't forget that some people are VERY skilled with photoshop.
People should have access to this data, no doubt about it. But anything done by an amateur should be taken with a grain of salt. I am not saying that amateurs can't do great work. But take any amateur data as being just a pretty picture to satisfy your curiosity. If you are a scientist, then don't stake your career on an amateur photo.
On the other hand, I COULD see some value to amateurs providing scripts. Some sort of automated process that could grab the raw picture directly from the NASA or ESA servers, and processing it using pre-defined rules. This would have the advantage of:
1) You know that no photoshopping is going on.
2) You know exactly what they are doing, and can modify thier process.
I COULD see something like this being useful to NASA and ESA.
Does anybody know of programs that could handle image manipulation according to a script? Imagemagik might be able to do some of this, but if I were doing this, I would want something that could also handle 2-D FFT and DCT conversions, and run complex scripts to work with the data as a matrix. Matlab would be perfect if it wasn't so expensive (and hard to find at home).
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I wouldn't say useless. I'll be using those pictures to pique children's interest in science. While news of the Titan landing is still fresh in their minds, I can show them WHY it's such a big deal. Wait six months for decent processing from the scientists and it will be a bit more ho-hum, rather like showing kids the Viking lander photos. Six months, 26 years - it's all the same to them.
The linked picture is bogus, but unfortunately so are the ESA pictures.
n s-esa-panorama-is-wrong.html
This is, quite simply, demonstrated here:
http://www.markcarey.com/mars/discuss-22278-huyge
There is a story about amateurs beating pros with Mars image analysis. Unfortunately the poster got the wrong one.
Of course, when the actual RAW Huygens images are released, the amateurs will leap further ahead.
So they won't be released.