Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Crater Moved
mytrip writes "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location. 'In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe. The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north. The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the US imagery. Lakdawalla determined that the crater in question wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south.'"
Haven't cartographers been known to put little errors like this in on purpose so they can tell if someone has copied their map? Still seems pretty silly to do it with such scientific data, but we know that China has no qualms manipulating any other kind of information.
It seems here that this is actually just a result of a vanilla screw-up.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Though instead of "stupidity" I'd substitute "error".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
..and what happens if they actually do find anything new? hello! Boy who cried wolf syndrome....
pffffft. that was the sound of their credability dying a death.
its sad really, somewhere in China there are some *very* capable engineers holding their heads in their hands.
They not only stitched it wrong, they also retouched the merge lines making the resulting image *useless* scientifically. It is just a nice picture now that one may as well have drawn. You can't do any measurements with it as all relative information is basically lost through their effort to make it prettier.
Here's the issue - your sense of humor is broken. Retardation is not funny - but my joke is.
Let's hit wikipedia real quick: Today's Feng Shui schools teach that it is the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment. Fen Shui originated in China. The picture came from China. See the connection? That my statement is absurd is what makes it funny. That Feng Shui would be banned by the Chinese government makes the joke that much funnier. This does not 'diss' (why do you diss english with this lame slang?) Taiwanese culture in the least. Taiwan doesn't even enter the picture - unless you are running around with some kind of chip on your shoulder.
Oh and as far as our supporting Taiwan - I personally took part in operations like this that have been a part of Taiwan remaining free from Chinese control. But I'm wandering now - the issue is your inability to get a joke. Pointing fingers at Christians and laughing at Allah could be funny too in the right context.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Yes, an intersting article by David Brooks. But what was your point?
It's called post-processing. You should go to the STSCI site and download some raw Hubble frames if you want to see some sources images that were "doctored" in the extreme to create those iconic images that adorn your calendars and desktops. The unprocessed frames are barely recognizable and contain huge amounts of visible noise from cosmic ray hits and all sorts of instrument artifacts.
The Chinese screwed up mosaicking their imagery. Big deal. Now that they know how far up their ass the scientific community will be looking, I am sure they will strive for more rigor. Their desire to be a contributing member of the scientific community appears genuine to me.
Edith Keeler Must Die
The thing is, they *didn't* move it. Slashdot horribly botched and distorted the reporting of the original article by Emily Lackdawalla in its header. Slashdot calls it "doctored". Emily calls it nothing of the sort.
What happens is that the spacecraft are moving around the moon and capturing long strips of images beneath them along their orbit. In this case, there were 19 strips. To make a single coherent image out of them, you have to stitch them back together. Anyone who's ever used a panorama stitching tool like Hugin is familiar with this: you pick keypoints, and the software rotates and distorts all of the component images to try and get them to match up. The problem is that the spacecraft is moving, and they don't know all of the topographic data below, so you're inherently going to get what are called "parallax errors". This results in what is commonly called a "misstitch" or "stitching error" -- effects such as a crater being duplicated. An extreme example of parallax error in ordinary photographic stitching can be found here.
Now, there are two different standards for image releases. The standard, for scientific releases, is to not blend the seams between the strips, so that it's easier to see what was a single source image. The standard for public releases is to blend the seams so that everything looks prettier. Blending is not a big deal; it's not like someone goes in with an airbrush and adds whatever the heck they want. It happens automatically in modern stitching tools; all you typically need to do is check a checkbox. Well, this being a public release, they blended the seams.
The only thing that Emily faults them for is for their scientist mistaking a stitching error for an actual feature. It's a silly little mistake, but it's certainly not "doctoring". Emily then expresses hope that they'll release the raw data, and apparently, it looks like they're planning to do just that.
It's a major insult to take a large number of people's hard work and accuse them of faking it. You don't get much more serious of a charge in the scientific community than that. There's a lot of justified indignation at people who accuse the moon landings of being faked. The people who worked on the Apollo program deserve an apology from the CTs for slandering their work. They'll never get it, but they deserve it.
The Chang'e team likewise deserves an apology from Slashdot for doing the exact same thing.
"I can't tell, do you feel bad or proud?" "No." "No to which one?" "Feel."