The Camera Behind The New Pluto Photos | Hacker News Reader

The Camera Behind The New Pluto Photos

theatlantic.com

78 pointssohkamyung43 comments

Article lacks pretty much any technical detail that would make it interesting. Whats the sensor size? What are the typical shutter speed? How do they compress the images? How do they compensate for the noise in now light? Do the cosmic rays impact image quality? Etc Etc.

So, duh.

Here you go :)

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-ralph.pdf

Awesome, at the other side of the spectrum :-)

Although the good photos we are getting are from LORRI, just re-colored with Ralph data.

The article does link to Ball Aerospace that provides more technical information on the camera [ http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=325 ].

Would it be better to provide a link to that page instead of the posted one?

Here's some information on LORRI.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/lorri_about.html

https://books.google.com/books?id=oZfpYIUKDrUC&pg=PA11&dq=ne...

There's something incredible about a 9 year old spacecraft carrying a 1 megapixel camera into space an having it work flawlessly 4b miles away. The LORRI team must be ecstatic right now.

> When you see Pluto looking tan- and sepia-toned in the new, high-resolution photos, you’re looking at data captured by Ralph.

This is somewhat misleading. The high-resolution photos are taken with the LORRI instrument and colorized with lower-resolution data from Ralph.

The result is absolutely staggering. I've previously missed the Jupiter picture and had to stop and really look to appreciate just how amazing that photo is, let alone the Pluto one - from the same camera, a mind-boggling distance away from us.

Yeah that picture of Jupiter/Io is amazing.

I actually had to sit down and think about the implications of these things when I saw the photos - how far we've come, what we've accomplished, the sophistication of our tech... it really is staggering.

Did you notice the aurora on Io?

I did! I was discussing this with my colleagues.

It's actually a plume from a volcanic eruption, which is even crazier.

The image of Io is especially gorgeous. I mean, does Io have an aurora going on there? So I pop "ralph jupiter io blue" into Google and got this:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_9...

Turns out it's from a volcano. Now, I get that we already knew about volcanoes there, and while I never really paid too much care about it, I can't help but be floored by that image. The plume is enormous, and it's blue. There's a lot of really, really cool things going on there (the color from the scattering alone is super neat), and suddenly I'm interested in extraterrestrial volcanoes.

I'm embarassed to say I continue to be shocked by how images from space can surprise and delight.

> I'm embarassed to say I continue to be shocked by how images from space can surprise and delight.

Never feel this way. We're tiny, really tiny and that's impressive and scary.

Getting to that image of Jupiter I just had to stop and marvel. Both at God's grandeur in making it, and the ingenuity of the people who made a machine that could get there. And of the two creations, creating people who eventually learn to do that is probably more awesome than creating a planet.

And I can't help but marvel at the creator of God. To create something that would go on to create people is really awesome.

(S)he could have added some rules to forbid creation of sicknesses and catastrophes. Also this 2nd rule of thermodynamics is very inconvenient.

While we are at it, could we get the speed of light changed, maybe stick some useful stuff in pi as well...

Every possible bit of useful stuff already exists in pi; you just need to know the bit index to retrieve it (in O(n) time, O(1) space).

This is because pi is almost certainly unbiased and irrational, thus it repeats at random forever, which means that all possible finite subsequences are eventually generated.

Wait, this means that I can represent any chunk of N bits by the bit index inside pi where I can find it at?

...dunno what this could be useful at, but this made my day :) thanks!

yes, but it costs O(n) to compute the nth digit of pi (bailey algorithm).

I've talked to people who wanted to publish streams of truly random numbers, where you choose an index into the stream, and the data at the index forms a private key (the shared secret is the index) used to encrypt data.

Sorry - the pi thing was reference to Carl Sagan's Contact.

I don't get why the down-votes. Is having a belief and expressing it wrong around here/against the forum rules?

No, but it's commonly downvoted. Posting about the technology alone would attract a better response here.

It's best not to react to the first hour of voting, let the masses even it out.

Content doesn't have to be against rules to be downvoted. I disagree with the opinion in it, so I downvote. It has nothing to do with rules.

If someone mentions they like a food or a movie or a song that you don't like, do you downvote?

Depends how it's phrased. If someone says "I like liquorice" then I'm not going to downvote. But if someone said "liquorice is the best food in the world" as if it was a fact, then I am going to downvote. If OP said "It is my opinion that Jupiter was created by god" I would not have downvoted. But it's his stating it as a fact which is making me downvote.

Maybe it's just me, but I reserve downvotes for trolling, intentionally misleading, flamebaiting, or off topic posts. If I see something I disagree with, I'll post a response instead of downvoting (as I am in this case). Downvoting purely because you disagree, especially without a rebuttal, is simply censorship.

He didn't say his belief is the only right one. It did contribute to the conversation for some of us. And I agree with a sibling commenter, downvoting should ideally be reserved for non-serious/troll comments?

Posting religious beliefs in a science based discussion will never go down well.

Groupthink.

Commenting about downvoting is against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Jupiter was the result of solar system formation according to physics which is running all over the universe. There's trillions of trillions of Jupiter's out there.

What's Marvelous is that exploded stars running on basic physics lead to interesting chemistry which eventually evolved into life and intelligence, which then creates science to understand itself. The universe according to basic physical laws leads to self-understanding of itself.

That's what's amazingly and miraculous. Substituting God into the story doesn't make it more amazing, it actually makes it less.

Nothing about our existence is amazing and miraculous if the popular multiverse theories are correct. In that case, we're just in one of a trillion-trillion to infinite copies of this universe that happens to look this way.

That'd still be pretty awesome, actually.

I don't understand why people say that. Even IF the multiverse theories are right (good luck finding evidence for that) our universe would still be amazing. Sure I'm "just" an animal, but the stars at night are still amazing, flowers are still amazing, my wife is still amazing and so on. I don't know of any evolutionary reason why humans should find the stars and nebulae beautiful and even if a reason was found I still see no reason why suddenly they would not be beautiful anymore.

If you have an amazing wife, you are more than "just an animal". Is it you God?

That could be considered equally, if not more amazing.

Everything you said is perfectly compatible with believing in God. Particularly believing in a God who is the source of existence itself, including the existence of matter and the existence of the physical laws which lead to the results you so eloquently described. None of that "substitutes God into the story".

Now, maybe the poster meant literal six day creationism, but that's a minority view even among American Christians. And that wasn't actually stated.

I'm interested in the data formats and image processing used for all this. I've heard a couple mentions in passing that they're "not in your standard JPG" but I'd like to know more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com