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NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-lot-of-scanning dept.

Lucas123 writes "Putting the images and film online will allow NASA to more easily share and showcase its achievements, including photos from its Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond, according to Computerworld's Todd Weiss. Much of NASA's archived photos and film is currently divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is. "Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."

4 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good Publicity by AsnFkr · · Score: 4, Informative

    NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself,

    A large portion of that money is dumped right back into the US economy via NASA paying private sector contractors to do development and production of their many needs. All of the money doesn't just vanish.

    --


    adventure-today.com
  2. High Dynamic Range Imaging by purduephotog · · Score: 3, Informative

    Try these links-

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_im aging

    A very good one here - the original authority on the matter-
    http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/

    Some technical research (with good examples and clips)
    http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings. html

    Does that help? Probably should have included it in my earlier post.

  3. Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA by JackHoffman · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem isn't the image data but the way it's presented to you. A normal computer monitor has a very limited dynamic range (compared to the real world). So does a paper print. Your eyes expect a certain contrast between parts of an image. If that contrast isn't there, the image looks dull and appears to lack detail. Now take a picture with a natural dynamic range that far exceeds what a monitor can recreate (just about any picture you take outside. The dynamic range is even greater in space due to the lack of atmosphere). If you map the brightest spot in that image to white on your monitor and the darkest to black, then you get a washed out image, because the original contrast is compressed to the maximum contrast that your monitor can produce. One bright highlight in the full range data means that another area in the picture which would normally be mapped to white is now a medium gray or less on the computer screen.

  4. Re:Good Publicity by lenehey · · Score: 5, Informative

    Lets keep it in perspective. NASA's FY 2007 budge was about $17.310 Billion out of a $2.8 trillion total budget. That means that NASA represents about 0.6% of the federal budge. Compare this to the $699 billion defense budge or even the $27 billion expended for agriculture, and you can see where our priorities lie. There were about 133 million individual tax returns filed last year. Therefore On a per individual tax payer basis, NASA's budget represents a cost average of about $130 per individual taxpayer (not including corporations) per year. Compare this to the defense budget to works out to about $5,250/year.