Tag: Image processing

Fake Saturn

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I love false-colour images.  They reveal detail that you can’t see in real life, but they also highlight things in an artistic way.  For me it’s an excellent marriage of art and science, and as a communicator it helps me get concepts across in an accessible way.  So when I saw the APOD image of Saturn from earlier this week, I had to discuss it. Saturn never has looked this way, and it never will.  The colours are vivid and unrealistic, but they show the differences in three distinct but close wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum.  All of...

Almost There: Pluto in a Month

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New Horizons is giving Earth the A-OK! All the systems look good and we are only 37.4 million kilometres away from Pluto.  Yes that is far, but considering we usually see Pluto at a distance 200 times that, we are doing pretty well.  The newest processed photos have come in from NASA and John’s Hopkins University, and they are starting to show a complex and mysterious surface chock-full of science goodies that make astronomers salivate like Pavlov’s dog when the bell rang.  But image processing is a science in itself, and I wanted to show you the difference between a raw photo...