New Horizons phones home
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://twitter.com/tothur/status/620601134651166720/photo/1
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-2010...
Shows better the previous best.
> The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/pluto-comes-into-focus...
This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...
What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia.
To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment:
1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden.
2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel.
3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden.
4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden.
See the problem with this?
Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are.
Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...
I really don't see the damage in releasing a sepia version of the picture. Why should I care that it's inaccurate? It's a postcard from the other end of the solar system.
As an example, here's an actual true-color image of the earth: http://imgur.com/EEt635V.jpg
And here's a "true-color" image of Earth, produced using the New Horizons / Huygens colorization technique of combining a greyscale image with very low-resolution color data: http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg
What's wrong with this? A.) It flat-out isn't "true-color", and NASA shouldn't be spreading inaccurate information, and B.) It's arguably a more boring image than the greyscale original (http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg), which leaves one better able to imagine possible color schemes, rather than fixating one upon a single, inaccurate, and very boring color scheme.
There are some bad color filter stories from NASA (such as making Mars surface photos look more like an Earth desert with blue skies than you would actually think if you were there). But this is not a case of that.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...
But my impression has been that they often do something more sophisticated: they have a high resolution greyscale image and a lower resolution color image (maybe just a few pixels, or maybe as much as half or a quarter of the greyscale resolution). Colorizing the higher resolution image using the lower one in that case seems entirely acceptable. (In fact, doesn't JPEG generally do something very similar for color images almost all the time?)
Do I have that wrong? Or is it just that NASA isn't good about reporting the relative resolution of the color component of their "true color" images? (That would be really nice, come to think of it: "This image of Enceladus has detail resolution 150x150 and color resolution 50x50.")
Turns out nebula look like grey clouds, not like psychedelic posters.
I know this stuff makes for some really sexy press, but it doesn't do much help for the general public who has an interest in science but not much time to figure out what's real and what's not real.
For those readers who are interested, they assign the primary colors to various important parts of the spectrum representing various elements.
Watched a wonderful set of lectures from The Great Courses that explains this. Highly recommended for laymen who are interested in astronomy.
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-the-uni...
[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and...
If we'd evolved in one of the Magellanic Clouds, we'd see an astounding squashed spiral view of this galaxy with direct line of sight of the bright nucleus.
Uhhhhhhh... Should somebody tell him?
Bolden says he still considers Pluto a planet. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11739763/Pluto...
Neptune/Pluto weren't yet discovered. Instead we had Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George (Uranus), Ceres, Vesta, and several other minor asteroids.
Acronyms
Use the abbreviated form of a title without explanation only if there is no chance of any misunderstanding (eg UN, Nato, IRA, BBC). Otherwise, spell it out in full at first reference, or introduce a label (eg the public sector union Unite).
Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide/art...
"Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card."
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a
Informally, it's sometimes referred to as "vat", e.g. calling a tax inspector "the vat man".
If used in context, no one is going to get confused by either pronunciation though.
> Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...
It seems strange that the highest ranked story about Pluto for the past few days has been from BBC not NASA. Check out www.nasa.gov for the original press release and updates as they come in.
It's a remarkable achievement but the science behind it has been known and used successfully for decades.
The short version is - for the most part these trajectories can be calculated with a decent degree of accuracy with relatively simple equations. Rocket engines tend to give acceleration in short bursts (which simplifies the computations a lot as well), so New Horizons was launched out of Earth orbit at about 16km/s and since then has only fired its own engines for short correction burns.
It's not meant to imply that this specific mission visited all the planets, just that this mission completes the achievement. (In his opinion).
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0624055...
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0714133...
An even more exotic arrangement, beyond electrochemical processes, to somehow 'metabolize' matter directly into energy would exceed the definition of life in my opinion, as though it would be life 2.0 or something, and also have a pretty fascinating impact on the universe.