4-Billion-Pixel Mars Panorama

Fake. This picture was taken in Baja as a NASA plot to fool taxpayers out of money.
 
Awsome! I've been waiting for more interesting hi res panorama for my wallpaper. Thanks!
 
That's one boring looking planet. Glad we're wasting money on that..
 
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
 
SomeoneElse said:
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
Click to expand...

See second post in thread.
 
I believe the images from NASA are usually highly doctored/processed so they look half-way decent, so that may be adding to the "fakeness" of it.
 
NASA photos tend to use a white balance filter so that the lighting and color would reflect how it would be seen through our eyes on Earth. If not, it's going to be a very or rather reddish-orange hue an slightly less brighter image and we won't even much of any details.
 
SomeoneElse said:
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
Click to expand...

I see that. The shadows look too blurry to me for it being so close to the ground. Seems they should be more sharp. That and the shadow from the Curiosity don't seem to effect the shadows created by the stuff underneath it.

Very interesting...
 
SomeoneElse said:
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
Click to expand...

Every NASA photo is photoshopped actually to make it more 'appealing' to general audiences. All of the photos taken by Hubble for example are in black and white and then colorized via rgb filters and touched up with Adobe Photoshop. Paraphrasing NASA: "It's as much an art as a science."

With that said though I really wish NASA could get more funding all around and be TOLD to do something real awesome. Hire Robert Zubrin as chief engineer and he'll put man on Mars in 5-10 years, that dude is mad scientist crazy and is obsessed with manned space exploration. I think that's the type of person we need, not these current boring NASA people who do a bunch of random "what if" experiments a few miles above earth
 
SomeoneElse said:
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
Click to expand...
Sorry, you got me. I took this picture with a high resolution camera when I was driving to Vegas on the I15 from LA to Vegas.
:)
 
PornoSatan said:
Every NASA photo is photoshopped actually to make it more 'appealing' to general audiences. All of the photos taken by Hubble for example are in black and white and then colorized via rgb filters and touched up with Adobe Photoshop. Paraphrasing NASA: "It's as much an art as a science."
Click to expand...

Pretty much this. I got the chance to visit the office of someone who searches for extrasolar planets and he showed me the raw pictures he works with. They don't look anything like the finished product.
 
SomeoneElse said:
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but does anyone else not think the curiosity looks fake in that picture? If you look at the shadow, that is not a natural looking shadow. It looks like a 3D render. Am i crazy or do others see this as well?
Click to expand...

That is because it is actually a "3d picture" of sorts, to properly see it come to this link:

http://www.360cities.net/image/mars...ed_image&utm_source=embed#-402.10,35.37,110.0

It was taken with a special fisheye like lens, and is then recomposited through the magic of computers, but still falls flat unless you get something like a projector and a curved screen.
 
PornoSatan said:
^ I'm not saying they photoshopped a rover into the pic though, lol
Click to expand...

You know, they might have done just that.

Zoom in on the boundary between the rover and the background martian surface on the area to the north / north west on the compass. You can clearly see a photoshop mask line.

They did more to this image than just color balance.
 
Any bets on how long it took to download that panorama from a satellite connection ~35 million miles away?
 
EndlessRed said:
Any bets on how long it took to download that panorama from a satellite connection ~35 million miles away?
Click to expand...

The panorama is 90,000 x 45,000 pixels. Assuming 32 bits per pixel, we get...

90,000 x 45,000 x 32-bit = 129,600,000,000 or 129.6 Gbit file size (or 16.2 MBytes)

Let's assume NASA uses the MRO (Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter) to get this image.

At its farthest range, data rate drops to around 500 bps (bits per second), and when MRO is its closest, it can be as high as 4 Mbps.
(Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/mission/communications/)

Doing the math... that gives us:
... at its slowest: 129.6 Gbit / 500 bps = 259200000 seconds or 3000 days
... at its fastest: 129.6 Gbit / 4000000 bps = 9 hours

So, we're looking at around 9 hours to 3000 days. That's for an UNCOMPRESSED, RAW image.

Since Curiosity compresses the images using a customized algorithm (based on JPEG-2000 and LOCO algorithms) and only one article I can find states it can compress a "12 Mbit image down to 1 Mbit," I'm going to assume a maximum 12:1 compression ratio.
(http://boingboing.net/2012/08/06/mars-curiosity-rover-boing-bo.html
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2197432/the-technology-powering-the-mars-curiosity-rover)

That means the 129.6 Gbit image should be... 129.6 Gbit / 12 = 10.8 Gbits, or 1.35 Gbytes for 295 images total.

Doing the math again, that's...
... at its slowest, 10.8 Gbits / 500 bps = 250 days for all 295 images
... at its fastest, 10.8 Gbits / 4000000 bps = 45 minutes for all 295 images

I'm sure my math is wrong somewhere and the compression ratio is probably way off. But, that should give you a rough idea.

(Note: Direct-to-Earth from Curiosity is much, much slower-- 32kbps (32,000 bits per second) at its fastest transfer rate.)
 
shoota said:
That's one boring looking planet. Glad we're wasting money on that..
Click to expand...

The interesting thing isn't it's aesthetic quality, but the fact that it is a whole different planet out there. The only thing it has in common with our planet is that both exist in the same solar system. We can predict and simulate what other planets may be like, but nothing beats actually visiting them.
 
Revdarian said:
That is because it is actually a "3d picture" of sorts, to properly see it come to this link:

http://www.360cities.net/image/mars...ed_image&utm_source=embed#-402.10,35.37,110.0

It was taken with a special fisheye like lens, and is then recomposited through the magic of computers, but still falls flat unless you get something like a projector and a curved screen.
Click to expand...

Man, I hate to be one of those people...but the shadows coming from the Curiosity look fake as fuck...like incredibly fake...like definitely Photoshopped fake.

I have a feeling there is more to this than what we think.
 
Does this NOT look fake as shit to anyone else? Yes, this is taken from the linked image.

Capture-8_zps531f6440.jpg


The rover is obviously a 2D image overlaid onto the surface and the shadow is obviously brushed in.

Don't want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this rover doesn't look right in the slightest. Any photo experts care to chime in? I hate to take what "SomeoneElse" pointed out...but I mean, look at that. WTF is that?! The rover is totally cut and pasted into the image. You can TELL it's a layer put in.

Just wow. WOW! Why would they do this? Is NASA just trying to make the photo look more legit or something?
 
It's a panorama created from 290 images
The rover probably looks like shit because it can't take a decent photo of itself.
 
Some of the photos of the rover are clearly black and white.
Nasa shop all the time. Doesn't mean it is fake.
 
JayJapanB said:
Some of the photos of the rover are clearly black and white.
Nasa shop all the time. Doesn't mean it is fake.
Click to expand...

Well, I guess my question is WHY do they Photoshop to begin with? If you look at my photo above the rover is noticeably faked/shopped...so why? Just for looks? Consistency?
 
JoeUser said:
Well, I guess my question is WHY do they Photoshop to begin with? If you look at my photo above the rover is noticeably faked/shopped...so why? Just for looks? Consistency?
Click to expand...

For looks.
Like how they enhance photos of planets. Keeps people interested.
If it gets them funding and keeps us happy I don't mind.
 
JayJapanB said:
For looks.
Like how they enhance photos of planets. Keeps people interested.
If it gets them funding and keeps us happy I don't mind.
Click to expand...

And, that these pictures of the landscape is much better looking than what the Viking Landers have taken thirty-plus years ago. That, and I don't think looking at reddish-orange hue blanketing the landscape to be appealing to the general public. Obviously they didn't have Photoshop back then. Just about every image from Mars since the first robotic rover we sent there are enhanced in a way to give us Earth-like colors. As I have said already, the original untouched images if you see them in raw form are more subdued and reddish-orange because of the way sunlight hits the Martian atmosphere. By readjusting the image through filters and white balance, we can get a sense of how Mars would look like through our own eyes.

Also, my best guess is that Curiosity was put into a forced-perspective and super-imposed over the landscape images taken by MASTCAM. That way we can get a visual idea on the position and perspective of Curiosity in respect to the surrounding background.
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2012/apr/20/hubble-space-telescope-stunning-colour-images

It is for the hubble but explains how they colorize with the black and white pictures...

What they do is use 3 different filters with the lens, one red, one green and one blue, so that each 3 black and white ultra high resolution picture is actually just a part of a single color picture.

That is just one small part of why they "Photoshop it", the other part is back to the fish eye lens. Fish eye greatly distorts the borders of the images, this is something that you can test for yourself in some first person shooters, just set the field of view way above 100 and have fun with the distortion.

The last part would be, that they desired an effect that is impossible in reality, and that is, the effect of a hovering camera over the curiosity, for this they must have taken the pictures in a way in which the final recomposition allowed them to erase the "arm" holding the Curiosity's camera. I agree that this one last step was "fake" looking since it forced them to add the shopped Curiosity so the general public could have an idea of how it was in reality.
 
JoeUser said:
I see that. The shadows look too blurry to me for it being so close to the ground. Seems they should be more sharp. That and the shadow from the Curiosity don't seem to effect the shadows created by the stuff underneath it.

Very interesting...
Click to expand...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/curiosity-drill-panorama/

Do you also notice how distant and hazy the sun is? Traveling to a planet far away and expecting similar "shadows" as earth has from the same sun just strikes me as hilarious.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top