Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
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.
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
Try these links-
m aging
. html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_i
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
Does that help? Probably should have included it in my earlier post.
Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?
Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".
In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.
On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.
Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.
In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.