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Why Russian Space Images Look Different From NASA's
An anonymous reader writes "The Russians have published two amazing photos of Earth using their new Elektro-L satellite, in 30,000km high orbit around the equator. The quality is stunning, and they look quite different from NASA's Earth images. But why are they different? And are they better than NASA's?"
Yep, just takes me to the home page.
The link was faulty the first minute or so the article was up, but it seems to have fixed itself now.
Gawker media should be summarily banned.
For those who don't know why http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/12/2234252/Gawker-Source-Code-and-Databases-Compromised
Well, they're in Russian, for one thing.
Nasa ones look better to me. Sand is a sand color, and the areas of shallow water are the turqoise blue/green color that they should be. Russian ones just show a flat dull blue.
Actually it is faulty the 1st time you click the link
After it sets its cookies it works fine ...
Gizmodo redirects any traffic to their localized versions. For example, I'm in Brazil and if I follow the link provided in the summary, they redirect me to http://www.gizmodo.com.br/#!5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before -- that doesn't exist and goes to the front page of the localized version.
Note that I both my OS and browser are in English. I even made sure that my "preferred language for displaying pages" are only English. I guess they do the redirection based on IP only, and find that quite rude.
In my experience with remote sensing better looking means nothing. What matters is the what kind of information we're able to extract from images. Like:
http://www.sciencephoto.com/images/download_wm_image.html/E750009-F._colour_Landsat_image_of_a_reservoir_in_Virginia-SPL.jpg?id=697500009
This a useful Landsat image (or composition, actually). It's also very ugly. But it's very useful.
We often had a guy to make a few beautiful images. Do the composition in the GIS software we used normally and our designed retouched it on Photoshop. People often went "wow" when looking at it but it was useless.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
for whatever reason ?
Read radical news here
Terrible article.. what's amazing here is that a whole mess of satellites have been launched to GEO but this is the first time anyone bothered to release photos from the altitude to the public. Isn't it glorious to see the entire Earth in one frame?!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Gizmodo always does that. The links all revert to their home page like the fucken inbred assholes that they are.
Remove the "#!" part.
http://gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before
Oh, gizmodo is horrible. First it took me to the german site, which didn't have the article. Then, after lots of manipulation (click the little 'US' label on the left top), I got to the article, but couldn't figure out how to close the stupid window that covers half of the cool image they're talking about.
But, to the subject: Isn't it fairly obvious why the russian image looks better? Look: compare the NASA image: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2429 to the russian one: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/images/spacecraft/application/weather/elektro/earth_disk1_1.jpg One obvious difference - in the NASA image, clouds have no shadow, in the russian one they do. That makes the NASA image look flat, and the russian one jump out in 3D. Why that is, I'm not sure.
Some NASA guy just explained that the Russian images are no worse and no better than NASA's images; they're just looking at the earth in different ways. There's no hint of blame anywhere (and indeed, there's nothing to be blamed for).
"the Russian images are not better or worse than their images. They are just different visualizations of reality based on different data sets" and this sums up nearly everything ever.
Gizmodo decided that their content looking a particular way was more important than working without javascript. They're probably right, I block their ads too, so I'd be less than worthless to them even if I was willing to let them run code in my browser.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/elektro.html
What are you talking about? Her vagina is totally blurred out.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
It's definitely borked still if you're on an iPhone. Goes to m. then fails to find the link. Also trying to localize. What a godawful mess of site disfunction.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The Russian photos are made entirely of data from red and infrared sensors. The NASA Blue Marble image is a completely, tragically fake rendering, with visible polygon vertices... but mapped with photos from beautiful RGB sensors.
Uh no... We had 2 megabit (down) satellite internet (i.e., from earth station, to satellite and to the other side of the world) in 1998.
From satellite down is only one transmission - from sky to ground.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you throw the moon + earth image into an image editor and adjust the levels, you'll notice that the moon was moved to make it more .. photogenic. The other image also has some signs of editing ... really is kind of funny.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
The russian photos in question combine infra-red with visible wavelengths. They are not better, just different.
+1 concise
These clowns can't produce reliable URLs. Don't reward them with links.
The image.
wow there's really nothing left of the aral sea?
Have gnu, will travel.
It is borked. If you are in Japan, you will be sent to the JP version where there is no article. In future it would be nice to link directly to the US page. Shitty gizmodo design. Seriously.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Curses! You tricked me into visiting Gizmodo. I will tolerate no more of your cretinous games!
These images look nice, interesting angles. They probably look slick because they've been post resized sharpened, the smaller versions on Gizmodo have been gently sharpened to make them pop a bit, it's a common photographic trick.
Even if you have a sharp 12-24 megapixel image, it can always use some sharpening when it's downsized for the web. If you don't sharpen after downsizing, photographs still look great but not as crisp as they could.
(And yes, if you sharpen the full size image and then downsize, the downsizing obliterates the sharpening done at full size.)
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
No, the link is fine, it`s Gizmodo itself that's borked. Ever since that nonsensical redesign, the whole site is one giant mess of AJAX.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
No, the site is supposed to look like that now.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
a model.
Sig this!
The US site is completely broken with scripting off. They've got so much cruft it's embarassing. Hey Nick, ever hear of progressive enhancement? Gracefully degrading? Judging from the hash bang in your URLs, I'm guessing you don't care. Thanks for breaking the web, buddy.
Are you viewing it from a mobile? I'm a server!
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Ummm... but that doesn't mean that the US images are any better or worse than the russian images.
Take, for example, what appears to be a Cal Tech prank that seems to have made it into NASA's photo-of-the-day, back when CASSINI was sending pics of Titan.
http://csma31.csm.jmu.edu/physics/rudmin/titan/titan.htm
Now, the author may be right -- it wouldn't seem that Titan could have an atmospheric-style plume, with strong wind shears at 10000 feet, now, would it? But right or wrong, my point will still hold.
Point being, that unless you are somebody who knows what they are looking at, all the photos are simply a pretty picture, nothing more.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"the Russian images are not better or worse than their images. They are just different visualizations of reality based on different data sets"
and this sums up nearly everything ever.
In post-Soviet Russia, satellite data and image visualizes you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Beauty is subjective, but the Russian version seems to have 3 key things going for it:
1. It's taken with the sun at the side instead of behind the craft, making for deeper cloud shadows.
2. The NASA image was probably taken through different color/wavelength filters (as described in TFA) and the clouds and/or the craft move a bit between filter changes, blurring the clouds in the re-combined images. The Russian one used a camera that works more like commercial cameras: different sub-pixels for different colors sampled at the same time rather than filtering one color at a time.
3. Because the Russians use a near-infrared wavelength in place of a visible-length color (also described in the TFA), the result has a reddish tint because of the way vegetation reflects light. Red and orange tint tends to appear sharper and brighter to most people than green, giving the images a subjectively sharper look. TFA didn't mention this sharpness affect, but as an amateur artist, I have noticed it.
Table-ized A.I.
Russian pictures are METRIC ours are not.
Gawker media should be summarily banned.
For those who don't know why http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/12/2234252/Gawker-Source-Code-and-Databases-Compromised
The exact same thing happened to Slashdot some years back. Database stolen, and it turned out Slashcode was storing user passwords cleartext at the time.
And you owe me a new irony meter.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Of course it would look different. The Russian image is actually taken in space, unlike the NASA one which was filmed in a sound stage.
Of course there is blame!
They pretend to show the Earth is round and lookit the Moon, round is too!
Nah, they just want to discredit God-fearing Americans who know the Earth is flat(*) because the Good Book says it so!
(*) I don't know that the Bible says the Earth is flat or not, but having been used to prove just about anything, I might as well postulate that it says it is flat.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Thank god the old site is still there and works even better:
http://ca.gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before
(the ca. prefix is applicable to all Gawker sites, couldn't live without it)
or Canada
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The Russian satellite also captures slight different wavelengths. Even if they had the same views, it would look different.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
thank you
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
In Soviet Russia Jokes make YOU.
more like ......image shops the fuck out of your brain.
Fixed link: http://us.gizmodo.com/#!5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before
The reason it's broken is that they redirect you to your country's/mobile platform's special web site when you omit the "us.". If you're in the US and using a desktop web browser you wouldn't notice.
I love how the author is an obvious Star Wars fan. But nonestly, I'd put "technological terror they'd constructed". There, fixed. :)
Exactly. Same thing here in Germany. Had to switch to the "US" version on the Gizmodo page; after that, it worked.
...with a lot of facts but no explanation.
The Russian images look more realistic because of the sense of perspective induced by the reflection of the sun of the globe. The Russian color schemes also look more alien, which catches your eye a bit more than the NASA (regular) color scheme, which we are used to seeing.
That is why near IR images of earth objects are so intriguing as well. It's a picture of an everyday object, but it just looks different!
They look different probably because Russia have pictures of the other side of the earth, you know, outside of USA.
Pro Coffee Drinker
...why in three fuck's name doesn't our trusty editor check even that?
No, it's not just him. Those idiots keep rerouting me to the gizmodo.de front page, where I can't see TFA.
No, it's no just him. For me, it keeps rerouting to the font page of gizmodo.de, TFA is not there.
Please, can someone post a link that works from Germany?
Still tries to reroute me to the gizmodo.de front page.
OMFG! Now I will end up going back to their sites.
With "real" I mean images with colors like a human would see from above there. Or at least like pictures taken with a good DSLR camera.
I really like to view the beautiful images they generate from data like the one Hubble delivers, but I am also interested in seeing how the things in space would look to a human eye.
To add insult to injury, I'm in Portugal and it redirects me to Gizmodo.com.br
The "Vivid" and "Photo" modes littering printers and monitors have as much relevance to Realism as McDonald sugar buns have to Bread. Fujifilm vs Kodak wasn't about quality, it was about hyperrealism. Digital just makes it all the worse.
ABP in Dragon or any other Chromium based seems to take care of the "problem" as well. And WTF is up with Gizmodo? Are they TRYING to run everyone off with that bloated POS? I thought the new /. layout (aka porky platypus) was bad, but this crap reminds me of some geocities "artistic expression"in the way it slams the CPU and gobbles RAM. Whomever designed that mess needs a good firing.
As for TFA...uhhh...they used different filters. Big whoop dee doo. look at Africa and you'll see anywhere that is supposed to be green is now red thanks to the filters. I don't see why the Giz guy is blathering on about how much more "real" it is compared to the NASA shots when the filters make the planet look like the desert wasteland at the end of Alien 4.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The earth is actually quite flat. Russia hires different artists to create their space "photography" than NASA. It's a conspiracy to keep us from realizing that the earth is really the center of the universe and that all of the objects in space move around us.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Same thing here. That's annoying.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Gizmodo is borked in general - at least for me. I like the content, but the site is damned near unusable - keeps logging me out, switches articles when I side-scroll (WTF!!! Some people actually use the side-scroll function on their mouse for scrolling FROM SIDE TO SIDE), and auto-refreshes to new articles when I'm still reading the old ones.
FF4 with NoScript turned off for all domains listed on Giz... what a I doing wrong?
I got the article on my iPad, although it took ages to load because it loaded a set of unrelated images along the top before displaying the actual content. Similar problem on the full version of the site on a slow connection: all the crap in the side bar has to load before the actual article will appear. Then there are all the links that just go to their own site, making the off-site source link hard to find.
Thanks! Nice find.
I still wish sites in general would realise that my browser handles large image files a lot better than their pathetic popups. They got it right for the second image, probably by mistake :)
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Obviously a huge Photoshop fail, this image highlights possible stamp tool locations https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Iv5FJWlGM-5OVSKJ7yWupw?feat=directlink original: http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/ve/2429/globe_west_2048.jpg
I wish all these fuckin' fuckers would just all lock themselves behind a paywall ghetto AND googlebot would ignore them. The goddamned web was designed for collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, not propping up your outdated business model.
And yes, another datapoint for borked in FF4 unless you let them run javascript on your browser.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Been working in GIS for 10 years. Yeah that's pretty standard.
Two sets of data:
1) That you use to do actual work and analysis on. It isn't pretty.
2) That you use for presentations, that is heavily edited, photo shopped/illustrator, and very pretty.
Managers and public don't want to see the stuff you do actual work on, as its fuglie as hell. They want pretty pictures they can go ohhh and ahhhh at.
Then of course they want all sorts of unreasonable requests based on that not knowing how many hours went into fudging it to make it look that way...
Can't say in this specific example, but its pretty common practice.
Anyway when doing analysis people aren't really actually "looking" at the image, rather looking at pixel values and applying computer algorithms to gather information, meaning, and to provide data for decision making processes. Different sats use different wavelengths, and have various resolutions, as well to consider, and much of the color is false color applied afterwords. Anyway its been awhile since I did much raster work, but such is what I remember.
Let me sum up the article, minus the propaganda: Russia has launched a new satellite that takes infrared pictures of earth. The Russian space agency is using those to produce false color images. They look really cool, and it is a big success.
Unfortunately, the tone of the article is "OMG! Did the Russians do something better than us Americans! It cannot be! But don't worry citizens: the American government can explain it away! Their camera is really only as good as our cameras, but they are post-processing the images to look like they are better! Go red white and blue!"
It makes me think of the Butter Battle Book, by Dr. Seuss. We don't need another cold war, so please I hope they tone down the rhetoric.
What looks 'better' varies by person, but in general anything goes when making an image beautiful to the eye. The Russians are using more infrared bands than most NASA images do, and their images have a lower sun angle. Both of these bring out details in the imagery.
If you want to see more images taken in infrared bands, take a look at the Earth as Art exhibit hosted by the USGS. (NASA is credited on some of them because it was involved with the satellites. And for full disclosure, I should mention that I personally created many of the images in the EaA exhibits.) We chose and created these pictures for aesthetic quality -- we wanted them to look good rather than be useful for science. But there are no photoshop tricks. Some of them are just using wavelengths of light that you cannot see with human eyes.
I think the point of this entire press release by the Russians is that they are savvy about public relations, and had enough foresight to distribute images that looked good instead of images with immediate scientific value. Not every government agency adopts that strategy -- we often try to wow the scientists first and the public later.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I used firebug to delete that div without turning javascript on.
I stopped visiting Gizmodo long ago, and now actively try to avoid it. The quality of reporting is almost zero, with their sole existence based on getting the most page views possible (profit), traditional journalistic standards are irrelevant.
Everyone knows we've never really been to space. The reason these two countries produce such different versions of space images is because neither has actually been there! So of course they came up with two totally different looks. I don't know how much more evidence you need to see the truth.
Same here. Was same, I mean. Go to the Gizmodo's main page once and click on the "US" link (upper right corner) to switch your country. Then the link from /. summary should work.
P.S. Old Gizmodo's design was ugly. New design - plain horrible. Web 2.0 WTF.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
LOL, at least it's the same language or is the Brazilian Portuguese already different enough that you don't understand each other?
Works only if you allow cookies, which will not happen.
Well, if you wanted to read content in English you'd set your browser's UI to English! Yes, that's apparently how Gizmodo determines which site you want to visit (someone from Portugal was sent to the Brazilian site; I see the American site even though I'm in Germany but I'm using a non-localized Firefox). Weird site.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Stupid localization. That's why it takes me to gizmodo.jp, to the front page there, with no indication of Russian photos of the earth. And more ads than I am willing to sort through.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'm in Brazil, and my Firefox is set to use US locales. Lo and behold, Gizmodo still sends me to the Brazilian site. I think it must be something about geolocation. Whatheva; the ca prefixed link a fellow slashdotter posted above works well for me.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Reroutes me to gizmondo.com.au and a slew of WP7 cruft...I dunno, try to actually RTFA for once and get redirected
Ah, now I get it: this is a conspiracy to teach us not to RTFA.