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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."
Without quality control it's usually possible to beat a company, or organization to the punch.
(And doesn't mean it is necessarily inferior in quality either).
But it is a little unfair.
I'm impressed with them..., but it's not a surprise really. With the raw data images being released as soon as they were made available, anyone who was interested enough could begin processing them immediately. I doubt NASA/ESA thought it was a race. But still, great job for them! They probably did it for a fraction of the cost that the big agencies needed to process the images ;-) So much beaurocracy..
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
When the amateurs can build a spaceship that can fly to Saturn!
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
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!
From the article:
Liekens does caution that not all of the pictures will be scientifically reliable, something that ESA and NASA obviously have to take care over.
"We're impressed with their ability and enthusiasm, and looked at their images with great interest," says Bashar Rizk, part of the Huygens imaging team from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
A key paragraph. Does fater always means better? Before we jump on the NASA/ESA bashing bandwagon, we should remember that both are renowned scientific institutions that gain reputation not by doing everything as fast as possible, but as accurately and precisely as possible.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
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!
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."
...but bear in mind that if NASA and ESA hadn't sent this probe there, there would not have been any raw data to process.
:-)
Thumbs up to the folks doing the processing, and thumbs up to Terragen for the great software, but big, big points to the folks who SEND THE PROBE.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
"Well, we could have beaten them, except for that darn 15 day delay due to concerns over the FCC.
"I mean, what if those images captured life on Titan, and they were right in the middle of a 'wardrobe malfunction' or something?
"I guess maybe in some ways we are still proud to be your father's space agency."
Amazing how the texture/wave pattern stays consistent right up to the land.
Hmm...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.
Yoda pleased to hear this will be.
'Distributed contributions' are turning many industries on their heads; think of music and more lately the creep into entertainment at large, for example, Napster on.
Science, even space science, has not been exempt from these sweeping changes even as those guarding the capitalistic infrastructure are, frankly, more intelligent and capable than those guarding 'entertainment' have been. It ought not to be that I need pay US$thousands to simply read scientific articles in the Journal of _______. The Internet exists because scientists pushed ahead (in the military's wake) in the name of information sharing. In protecting their overpaid publishers' investors, fat Universities and other players minting on controlled access to knowledge, the scientists have to some extent let us all down.
I'd very well expect more significant contributions from 'amateurs' and including the crowd here, were the general quest for knowledge less constrained by capitalism. We have all the tools at our fingertips, literally, to undo more of the corporatism we can refer to roughly as 'closed source'. It's up to the real players though, the scientists themselves, to do as they have done here. Way to go, ESA. Viva la revolucion.
BG
...In this upcoming Mastercard commercial:
Coffee table book on Nasa. . . . . . . . . . . $19.99
Open source images from Titan . . . . . . . . Free w/ Terragen
Beating Nasa to Mars with a manned mission . . Priceless
There are some things Bill Gates has already bought, for others, there's Mastercard.http://img118.exs.cx/img118/8690/cassinipic7sg.jp
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
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.
When you're willing to work all night through because of your love for hacking, you'll likely beat those who treat this as a daytime job -- and have a life otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If am amauteur goofs and gets the wrong color, or maybe points out something that is really noise, no one is going to really notice. If NASA goofs, on the other hand, everyone notices. Besides, the NASA people were also probably trying to find signs of fluid motion and stuff, the amauteur's were going for "cool" views. :-).
But I must say to the amauteurs, GO FOR IT
On hearing, pleased will Yoda be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
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.)?
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/. id's under 3000 be allowed to say something first and not to expect any good posts in the future from important folks? Something to think about... ;^) ;^b
Sometimes I don't understand the academic types in their desire to "own" an area of knowledge. Knowledge that is discovered using public moneies cannot be "owned", and nobody has a "right" to publish something before someone-else, just because they were breathing air near their first.
I'm certain they "want" to publish first, and quite possibly they "own" their techniques to process the discovered information in their proprietary way, but that's a far cry from having the "right" to publish first.
This arguement was advanced during the human genome project. Somehow academics felt they had a right to publish it before the industrial folks (like celera which developed different and faster techniques to analyse the "public" discovery of DNA). I'm sure a few academics had their careers represented by the HG project and the fact that someone stepped on their turf was probably very infuriating, but that is life.
We've come a long way from the time when a few "priests" owned knowledge and kept it from the unwashed masses because they were the only ones "trained" to interpret it (conveniently by writing it in latin). Somehow some academics can't leave that era behind. "Big" science is funded today by public money and it's really hard to make the argument that raw images of important discoveries funded with public money aren't available to the public.
I tire of the high priest/priestess arguements made by the academic community. Why don't they just come up with something better and faster to make it worth waiting for, rather than complain that someone is doing it better and faster than them and they have some inherent "right" because they dabbled thier toes in that turf first?
Anyhow, how different is that than a "first post"? Normally, nobody reads them because they are often not interesting, but what if someone said something interesting and it just happened to be from an anonymous coward and first in the list? Should we be complaining that it was an anonymous coward and only people with
[/RANT]
These guys are amateurs. They admit that they're not trying to compete for scientific accuracy with the major space organizations, and that they have taken creative licence with the coloring of these images, and that the details may be inaccurate. If they were trying to do a professional job of processing these images, with an emphasis on accuracy, then they would be doing a professional job, and you would refer to them as professionals. Since they are taking creative licence with the images, and admit to the distinct possiblity of inaccuracies, they are considered amateurs.
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.
The NASA scientists would be fools to release these images in a raw format as soon as they're available and then try to beat amateurs, who aren't responsible for the rest of the mission. Once the information is obtained years can be spent analysing it. In other words, when the mission is in progress the teams are focused on the mission, not post mission analysis.
All these guys did was use software to make 3d models of the terrain and then pictures from those models. If you want to try something really fun, and have a mathematical inclination and a lot of time on your hands try downloading pictures from hubble, or from one of the large radio telescopes and doing some data reduction. The software's freely available on the web and runs on Linux. To get anything meaningful from the data you'll have to spend a lot of time learning about the data, instruments used to capture it, and the astro sources you're looking at though.
This is the sort of thing that should be encouraged in highschools and unis around the planet.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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
These independent image analysis efforts are laudable and interesting but seem to lack the psychological aspects. I think what many lay-people want most from these images is a sense of what it would look like to them if they were there themselves standing on the titanscape. This is much more complex than just stiching the images together and has a lot to do with how the brain processes visual information. For example, although the colors in the images are all pretty orange, the way the brain perceives color relies in part on subtracting out the background and seeing the _relative_ color of objects in the field of view. Also, the total level of illumination has not been defined (there was some speculation that daylight on titan would be like full moonlight on Earth), and this will influence both the spatial resolution and color perception that a human (even with dark-adapted eyes) would see. Has anyone tried to take these psychological/neurological factors into account when generating these processed images?