Slashdot Mirror
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
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."