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NASA releases first Chandra photos
Gedanken writes "Nasa has released the first images from the new Chandra Project X-Ray telescope and they are spectacular. It will be researching high energy events such as supernovas, quasars and black holes. "
No its not useless as a piece of evidence. Linear colour maps aren't appropriate for all purposes. In this particular case the colour map was chosen to highlight features of interest to astrophysicists.
Non linear colour maps are all over the place. They're much more common than linear maps. Go buy some Fuji Velvia for your 35 mm camera. It takes awfully nice portraits doesn't it? It's because the colour map is tweaked to provide pleasing flesh tones.
This isn't any different than a mathemetician using a logarithmic scale to do a plot of a function with exponential growth.
You could read a newspaper from half a mile away or see the letters of a stop sign from 12 miles. That's the kind of strength and accuracy packed into the world's most powerful X-ray telescope -- NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Wow.. works in Xray too.. reminds me of that video camera that could see thru clothing (kinda)..
"Now, the new NudieCam! Using fabulous X-ray technology developed by NASA, you can video tape women in their undies, from up to 12 miles away!"
hah!
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Oh My God... they slashdotted NASA. YOU BASTARDS!
I can see the fnords!
X-rays aren't visible to human eyes at all, so of course you have to process the image to display them in visible wavelengths. This is standard practice for all astronomy outside of visible light (which is most astronomy these days, actually.) The image of Cas A was mapped onto a red scale, where
white = highest intensityyellow = high intensity
red = low intensity
black = lowest or no intensity
The quasar image was done similarly, only using a blue scale rather than red. Right now, these colors are pretty much arbitrary, but later on, we'll probably start coming up with color maps that have a bit more science behind them, especially once we get into spectroscopic imaging.
Trust me, you don't want us to start displaying the images in "true-color" X-ray unless you have some passing desire to fry your eyes. Oops. ;-)
- Marshall
mperrin@cfa.harvard.edu
YOU IDIOT!!!! Chandra is not named after a chick. In case you forgot, (or just plain don't know) Chandra is short for Chandrasekhar. A Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist.
We should make a Beowulf cluster of those babies. That would ROCK!
/* Just kidding. */
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