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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?"
Well, they're in Russian, for one thing.
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.
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.
"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.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/elektro.html
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.
Reading The Friendly Article should not be summarily banned.
For those who don't know why: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/elektro.html
This
The russian photos in question combine infra-red with visible wavelengths. They are not better, just different.
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.
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.
Quite the opposite really. The Russian image is mostly from the infrared actually, so the colors are necessarily false. As realistic as it seems, that's not something the naked eye can ever see. It is a really nice artistic rendering, but probably not what they use for analysis.
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.
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)
From the article: "The images . . . are a combination of visible and near-infrared wavelengths, so they show the Earth in a way not visible to human eyes (vegetation looks red, for example). They're not any better or worse than NASA images, but they show different things.". The Russian satellite just takes pictures using different wavelengths. I think the NASA pictures do not use as much near-infrafred.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.