NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films

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."

Comments

Good Publicity

[Boa Constrictor]

It's nice to see something positive about NASA, I expect they're still fighting pretty hard to remain relevant to the US taxpayer. Furthermore, the whole "drunken astronauts" debacle didn't show them off in a good light. NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself, but the spin-off products work their way into consumer sectors, so it's important that funding continues. With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Re:Good Publicity

[canuck57]

With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Just think, if we traded a never ending war for NASA, how much money we would save and get space flight too?

For mortgages, no big. Let the low cost lenders take the bite. Part of what is wrong here is the government spends too much money in all the wrong places and everyone expects the government to bail out banks who lent money at a rate not reflecting risk. Let the market correct I say.

If you really want more people into science, get more science; base your economy on science and not war and corporate welfare.

Re:Good Publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to consider that a society only can produce so many goods or services. How these are allocated is the salient point. As a simple example, assume the government of a society can pay a contractor to produce weapons, spaceships, or farming tools. The first option, weapons, doesn't help society in the short-term or the long-term. The second option, spaceships, doesn't help society in the short-term, but the research done might allow for some technological advances in the long-term. The third option helps society in both the short-term and the long-term.

When asking ourselves if we should support the efforts of NASA, we should be asking ourselves how much extra energy, time, materials, etc. we have to commit to research and development.

Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

The first time NASA scanned a bunch of old chromes they used Kodak's HR-500 scanner. I got in on the end of that, after all the work had been done and (unfortunately for the world) after all the images had been rendered to 8-bit JPG/tiff files.

I'd hope the contacts I put in place could talk to each other and do it right (extended bit depth scanning, custom raw image processing) but since my old group at Kodak has been gutted to 1 person (a supervisor with no direct reports) and the building that housed all the scanning knowledge and equipment is being torn down... I somehow doubt it.

Once again, the world loses out in terms of better images holding more information.

Not that I don't think NASA will do their best- they just didn't have access to the kinds of equipment and the low-level software interface to allow the levels of high precision I'm talking about.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[north.coaster]

If they use the similar technology to what they are using here then it may turn out better than you expect.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

OOOOooh I missed that post.

One thing that they (wrongly) state is that 16 bit is better than 8 bit. Yes- it shows more grey levels. But it doesn't show more DENSITY levels. That's the problem when people scan various films- film can have a tremendous density range (3.8 or so), and when you capture that much range you get images that look pathetic. They then have to be rendered down to a human-pleasing visual curve- S curve- and then what you see is something nice.

Every scanner on the market scans for an 8 bit 'S-Curve' with more grey levels (10, 12, 14, etc). Most can't/won't give you access to the raw transmission data (density = 1/transmission). I'll have to see if I can't get my old tutorial on the differences, but if you have 12 bit 'raw' density (linear corrected, of course- so greys track grey) then you can use specialized algorithms or dodging and burning to adjust the image, bring shadows up, bring highlights down, restore detail, change localized contrast- THEN YOU RENDER IT to 8 bit (or 10 or 12 bit) with the appropriate human-pleasing S-Curve.

I'm probably not making alot of sense because there are very few people out there that understand fundamentally that every scanner, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 bit, is really throwing away a TON of the data on your film... and it's scanning it in such a way that you miss out on all that information, permanently.

But I was always picky like that.

NASA's Greatest Hits

[Doc Ruby]

NASA should collect some hilights of its collection and distribute them on DVD to every American. They should mail out a little book with color photos and URLs, with a DVD of what Americans pay NASA to do.

They should hire some people from AOL with the experience in those mass disc mailings. To reduce waste, NASA should include a return envelope with return postage for people who don't want it. And once the DVDs are distributed, NASA should show a TV series on PBS featuring some DVD content along with other material only shown on the TV premiere. Then NASA should sell additional content, including the TV show.

Even if NASA spends as much as AOL spends to spam us with discs, it will be worth every penny. Americans love NASA when we see it on out TVs. It's consistently among the most valued and inspiring government programmes. It's always giving us "free science" that's consistently improving our lives. If NASA just put more of that inspiration in our hands, it wouldn't have to scrape for cash and whore itself to non-science agencies nearly as much.

We deserve NASA. And NASA deserves our appreciation. If it just got sexed up a little more, especially now that shuttle launches are infrequent, winding down, and so often dramas of failure, packaging the science in handy consumer toys would reconnect us with some of our greatest successes.

Re:NASA's Greatest Hits

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because that would be an excellent use of the funding that NASA fights to get...

Here's a better idea - take some of that $500,000,000,000+ ANNUAL defense budget and reprioritize some of that into USEFUL things, such as NASA.

On a side note, I was watching The Dream Is Alive last night and it was humorous to see how optimistic about space travel we were a mere 20 years ago. Comments like how our grandchildren will be born in space (remember that this was made one generation back, so they're saying that kids will be born in space any day now). *sigh*