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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."
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.
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make install -not war
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.
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.