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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.'"
They moved it to cover up the obelisk!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... who on earth would do such a thing?
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
SPOILER: It was a poor stitch/blend job.
This guy's the limit!
probably a feng shui thing.
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?
They should have used the original movie set in New Mexico.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
You know those crazy craters, getting legs and all. Happens all the time.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Bad Astonomy readers are already up to date. It's an error in composition of the picture. Nothing less, nothing more.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The main difference between Chinese and American moon missions: 30 minutes after the Chinese have explored the moon, they feel like exploring it again.
Proverbs 21:19
The US version looks way more realistic.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
FairTax baby!
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.
http://xkcd.com/331/
Couldn't the additional small crater seen in the Chinese photo be from an asteroid collision that occurred after the Clementine picture was taken?
Yep, that is exactly what happened. The asteroid hit a rectangle of terrain from another spot in the old photograph and blasted it up in the air.... well of course the moon has no air but you know what I mean... and this rectangle of terrain landed intact at the new location. Quite simple and obvious really.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As per the TFA, a mistake was made stitching together 19 separate photographs to produce image of a large area of the moon that the probe could not have captured in one shot. Since each picture is taken at slightly different angle and distance from the surface, some retouching is unavoidable. Otherwise some craters will look like a weird set of arcs with different radius rather than circles. Such stretching got to slightly move some depicted object from their exact position. In fact, it is not possible to produce a flat picture of a 3D object without distortions. Just compare the size and shape of Alaska on your globe as compared to your map.
I would assume that you can request the original mission data for serious research use instead of having to rely on newspaper clippings for science. If those images are also doctored, then we have a genuine controversy.
The original article says and suggests nothing about the photo being "doctored", it's simply a mistake that scientists make all the time. When can we expect a better moderated Slashdot or people who can read?
The summary almost criminally neglects to include the reported reason for doing this, which is entirely legitimate:
Often, surface features that show up on two strips of data have to be manually corrected to produce the finished image, due to subtle changes in perspective.
"You know that there should have been seams in that image, and I just did not look for them carefully at the time," Lakdawalla told me today.
If you've ever viewed satellite imagery, you'll recognize that the source images are not nice, ultrahigh resolution wide arc views, but instead low resolution wide arc views or high resolution narrow arc views. The 'recognizable' product that is released to a nontechnical public, such as the images used in Google Earth, are the result of post-processing including image registration, tone correction, etc. See this article on mosaicing multi-sensor images, for example.
Surprise. Some technician made a mistake. No cookie.
I realize that it goes against the general Slashdot commenting procedure, but read just a little before commenting on this one, please.
1. Two photos were poorly stitched together, repeating an image of a crater on the combined photo (the crater was photographed twice).
2. Chinese scientists miss the poor stitch job and proclaim they found a new crater.
3. Someone else takes a close look at this "discovery" and points out the error in the stitch job.
The crater wasn't intentionally added, it's a result of trying to align two photos, each taken from a different perspective in which the edges won't completely line up exactly.
http://xkcd.com/331/
Use of the chinese version of photoshop would be easy to test for, it has the lead-based paint bucket in place of the regular one...
Seppuku a.k.a. "Hari Kari" is a japanese tradition.
Which is why China is a mature fascist country as opposed to a communist country.
see http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001682
Snippet:
China is not, as is invariably said, in transition from communism to a freer and more democratic state. It is, instead, something we have never seen before: a maturing fascist regime. This new phenomenon is hard to recognize, both because Chinese leaders continue to call themselves communists, and also because the fascist states of the first half of the 20th century were young, governed by charismatic and revolutionary leaders, and destroyed in World War II. China is anything but young, and it is governed by a third or fourth generation of leaders who are anything but charismatic.
The current and past generations of Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, may have scrapped the communist economic system, but they have not embraced capitalism. To be sure, the state no longer owns "the means of production." There is now private property, and, early last June, businessmen were formally admitted to the Communist Party. Profit is no longer taboo; it is actively encouraged at all levels of Chinese society, in public and private sectors. And the state is fully engaged in business enterprise, from the vast corporations owned wholly or in part by the armed forces, to others with top management and large shareholders simultaneously holding government jobs.
This is neither socialism nor capitalism; it is the infamous "third way" of the corporate state, first institutionalized in the 1920s by the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, then copied by other fascists in Europe.
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
...That's because they didn't use the same original sound stage as NASA's faking of the moon, but soom cheap Chinese Z-movie knock-off. With Philipino actors.
...Yeah, but moving the crater a little bit further south made whole moon a lot more Feng Shui. Letting the Qi flow freely.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]