The Space Thread

[Diurn]

I remember diving into the hubble satellite image gallery back then, being mesmerized by the beauty of nebulosas and supernovas floating so far away. Can we consider space photography some kind of art?

[auxien]

7 minutes ago, Diurn said:

I remember diving into the hubble satellite image gallery back then, being mesmerized by the beauty of nebulosas and supernovas floating so far away. Can we consider space photography some kind of art?

given how heavily edited/colorized/etc nearly every 'space' photo you see is, they maybe are more art than science.

the scientists and amateur enthusiasts who do this often spend untold hours trying to make the imagery look the way it does, and of course nearly everyone doing so is trying to be 'accurate' in some sense or another (scientists for their specific needs, of course)...but almost nothing is as a naked eye would see it. especially the really cool looking shit, it's all colorized and tweaked and such.

[may be rude]

15 hours ago, Diurn said:

I remember diving into the hubble satellite image gallery back then, being mesmerized by the beauty of nebulosas and supernovas floating so far away. Can we consider space photography some kind of art?

yeah it's a pretty nuts form of nature photography. absolutely some of the most beautiful images we have. 

 

14 hours ago, auxien said:

given how heavily edited/colorized/etc nearly every 'space' photo you see is, they maybe are more art than science.

the scientists and amateur enthusiasts who do this often spend untold hours trying to make the imagery look the way it does, and of course nearly everyone doing so is trying to be 'accurate' in some sense or another (scientists for their specific needs, of course)...but almost nothing is as a naked eye would see it. especially the really cool looking shit, it's all colorized and tweaked and such.

colorization generally occurs when the photography is of wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum. and yeah those wavelengths wouldn't be apparent to the naked eye. but a lot of photos are visible light. sometimes multiple photos of different spectrums are overlayed. usually these details are included in the place that the photo is published. and yeah some software enhancements probably occur in some cases. i think a lot of it is not very different from brightness/contrast kind of adjustments done with conventional photography. sometimes enhancements are more drastic, like with pluto, charon, mercury, and star fields, there are photos where saturation is dialed up a lot. saturation is often increased to some extent, though this is also common in conventional photography. many nebulae, if you could travel up close, would look close to a lot of their photos. 

 

this is a visible light photo of the orion nebula

Edited October 8, 2021 by very honest

[auxien]

that is not a visible light image of the nebula. see: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-42-the-orion-nebula

Quote

This stunning Hubble image offers the sharpest view of the Orion Nebula ever obtained. Created using 520 different Hubble exposures taken in multiple wavelengths of light, this mosaic contains over one billion pixels. Hubble imaged most of the nebula, but ground-based images were used to fill in the gaps in its observations. The orange color in the image can be attributed to hydrogen, green represents oxygen, and the red represents both sulfur and observations made in infrared light.

edit: i don’t mean to deride you or anyone misunderstanding this. it’s a huge problem in science communication imo, and there is very little time or effort given to explaining what is actually being shown in almost all cases…and even when it is explained it is not clear to the layperson.

Edited October 8, 2021 by auxien

[may be rude]

2 hours ago, auxien said:

that is not a visible light image of the nebula. see: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-42-the-orion-nebula

edit: i don’t mean to deride you or anyone misunderstanding this. it’s a huge problem in science communication imo, and there is very little time or effort given to explaining what is actually being shown in almost all cases…and even when it is explained it is not clear to the layperson.

 

hm i got that from this nasa.gov page, and it is classified as visible light. my guess is that, where it says "different wavelengths" in your source, it is referring to different wavelengths of visible light?

 

btw i take your point. i agree with the poster who said that space photography can be as good as (or better than) art. some methodologies produce more altered results, and it is good to understand that. for some imaging, like the first black hole capture, a lot of software was used to resolve the final picture, so it is hard to think of it as a traditional photo. with juno probe photos, raw data is open sourced for community processors, and i think a good deal of software tricks are employed to make smooth mosaics out of the tiles of source data taken from the moving probe. but, when it comes to non-visible light photography, the false colors don't take away from my enjoyment. i like to know if it is visible or non-visible, but aside from that, it's kind of an arbitrary distinction. in terms of extreme saturation enhancement, that's kind of like data visualization overlayed on the source image, so i would agree that those are more creatively modified. and, yeah, a lot of various types of astronomy photos are mosaics and/or superimpositions that may have required some work to get looking complete. i agree that some of those can be less enjoyable. but, many are more straightforward and more like traditional photography. 

Edited October 8, 2021 by very honest

[auxien]

ha, yeah, my source is also NASA obviously. they're not contradicting themselves, but the 'visible light' wording you used and i also used isn't exactly accurate, or perhaps entirely honest to the layperson, here. the page/text i quoted from further explains how they've manipulated the image. they're coloring the 'visible light' to extremes that are unnatural/surreal...like you mention happens in photography all the time. they sure look cool, but that's not what you see if you were to look at it with your naked eye. if i understand it correctly, NASA stating 'visible light' in these cases is only referring to the initial images having been taken using the Hubble which only captures light in the 'visible' (or visible plus a little extra) portion of the spectrum. multiple images are then layered, colorized, etc.

what you see with a 'naked eye' type visual is still absolutely stunning and beautiful, undoubtedly. but it's not all the ludicrously multicolored sweeping ultraclarified stuff often shown. 

i'm not going to teach a course on the intricacies of all of this, mostly because i do not 100% understand it in this case or in photography in general. i know some of the basics.

anyway, here's some resources if you're interested in researching on your own. i'm 100% sure this has been discussed ITT before as well. there's some good examples below of what can and cannot be achieved, and you'll likely start to get an idea of how much is the telescope vs how much is the editing in post:

https://www.galactic-hunter.com/post/m42-the-orion-nebula

https://www.messier.seds.org/more/m016_m2.html

and this one shows the more extreme editing/liberties being taken with super long exposures

https://astrobackyard.com/orion-nebula/

long exposures and photo stacking and editing creates that super fake looking shit listed under 'My Best Image'

Edited October 8, 2021 by auxien

[may be rude]

yeah i would agree with all that. the long exposure effect is a good point, that makes a big difference. stuff would be dimmer. i guess you could compare viewing the milky way with no light polution and on a clear night with hubble mosaics of it. in the desert the sky looks like marble, but not as bright as the long exposure shots. the long exposure is like audio compression on the lightness.

Edited October 8, 2021 by very honest

[Rubin Farr]

 

[Rubin Farr]

 

[MaartenVC]

1 hour ago, Rubin Farr said:

 

Here's William Shatner's (aka Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise) reaction at the end of the flight:

 

[thefxbip]

34 minutes ago, MaartenVC said:

Here's William Shatner's (aka Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise) reaction at the end of the flight:

 

Damn Shatner is having quite the existential revelation hahaha 

Thats an artist in space for you. Quite moving.

 

Bezos and his crew tho...hm...

Edited October 13, 2021 by thefxbip

[MaartenVC]

Lucy: The First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids

"Time capsules from the birth of our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago, the swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. The Trojans orbit the Sun in two loose groups, with one group leading ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trailing behind. Clustered around the two Lagrange points equidistant from the Sun and Jupiter, the Trojans are stabilized by the Sun and its largest planet in a gravitational balancing act. These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.

Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojans. The mission takes its name from the fossilized human ancestor (called “Lucy” by her discoverers) whose skeleton provided unique insight into humanity's evolution. Likewise, the Lucy mission will revolutionize our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system.

Lucy will launch in October 2021 and, with boosts from Earth's gravity, will complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids — a Main Belt asteroid and seven Trojans, four of which are members of “two-for-the-price-of-one” binary systems. Lucy’s complex path will take it to both clusters of Trojans and give us our first close-up view of all three major types of bodies in the swarms (so-called C-, P- and D-types).

The dark-red P- and D-type Trojans resemble those found in the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the Main Belt of asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter. All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.

No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around our sun. Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets."

Edited October 17, 2021 by MaartenVC

[cloud capture]

 

[Rubin Farr]

Artemis I now assembled for a scheduled February 2022 unmanned launch. Artemis will travel beyond the orbit of the Moon on a 3 week mission, that will make it the farthest an astronaut-capable craft has every traveled from the Earth.

[auxien]

https://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-first-ever-photo-of-earth-from-space/

first (known) photo of Earth from space was taken just 74 years ago today. only 74 years ago, now we've got rich tourists joyriding there and idiots going up just to shoot dumb movies.

[iococoi]

 

[may be rude]

 

[MaartenVC]

Black matter might not exist...
Instead there might be some more gravitational physics at work...
The hypothesis of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)

Also, I was wondering if we could maybe change this thread into "The Science & Space Thread" ?
This way we could also post about: computer stuff, new technologies, physics, math, biology, etc... in here.
Might bring more life to this thread, and might expand interests. It's all connected anyway.

Edited November 11, 2021 by MaartenVC

[iococoi]

Quote

A Startup Just Launched A Rocket By Spinning It Really Fast And Then Letting Go

https://jalopnik.com/a-startup-just-launched-a-rocket-by-spinning-it-really-1848040339

 

[Rubin Farr]

On 10/13/2021 at 1:14 PM, MaartenVC said:

Here's William Shatner's (aka Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise) reaction at the end of the flight:

 

Unfortunately, one of the pilots on the Shatner flight was killed in a plane crash, RIP

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/pilot-flew-william-shatner-space-killed-plane-crash/story?id=81136358

[auxien]

On 11/11/2021 at 7:41 AM, MaartenVC said:

Black matter might not exist...
Instead there might be some more gravitational physics at work...
The hypothesis of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)

Also, I was wondering if we could maybe change this thread into "The Science & Space Thread" ?
This way we could also post about: computer stuff, new technologies, physics, math, biology, etc... in here.
Might bring more life to this thread, and might expand interests. It's all connected anyway.

i've long been in the camp that Dark Matter and possibly Dark Energy are total hokum. MoND, some variation, or something related seems the most obvious as most of the DM issues are entirely based on our lack of understanding of gravity. i still do not understand the rationality of going "hm, we're seeing some weird stuff regarding the behaviors of gravity in these cases...and we all know we don't fully understand how gravity works. i guess it's not related to gravity at all tho so let me assume it's something we have essentially no other evidence of that actually ends up being 5 times more numerous than actual matter. and even after decades and decades of research we'll have almost no more of a clue of what it even is! this makes sense! can't say gravity is wrong even tho we don't know how it works!"

i watched this video not long ago as well, Sabine Hossenfelder is always a good resource imo, she tends to follow the sniff test of 'is this bullshit?' but backs it up with some actual logic and science since she's, y'know, an actual scientist and not just some schlub sitting at home like me  she doesn't go into too much 'new' until the last bit but even then it's nothing terribly strong, just what she's saying might be a promising idea.

 

[prdctvsm]

 

 

[Rubin Farr]

 

[Rubin Farr]

Jupiter aligned with our Moon

[Scaramouche]

^ Nice, photo just needs a monolith