Back Again and Thrill the Public
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
Processing images from the camera aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter has turned into a cottage manufacture of sorts, equally rank amateurs, accomplished artists and experienced researchers turn relatively drab "raw" images into shots ranging from whimsical to spectacular and everything in between.
The question is, how accurately do they reflect reality, and is there any mode for the casual observer to judge the result?
Unlike other NASA spacecraft, the JunoCam imager aboard the Juno spacecraft was added to the mission primarily for public outreach. Its pictures take no bearing on the mission'due south scientific objectives, which rely on a suite of 8 other instruments to study Jupiter'southward interior construction, its gravity and magnetic fields and its immediate environment.
JunoCam'due south images are only lightly processed by the camera's builder — Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego — and immediately posted on line. What happens afterwards that is up to the public.
"Once it's in their hands, we have no control, nor do we want to exert any, over what they do with the data," said Candy Hansen, a senior scientist at the Planetary Scientific discipline Institute and the JunoCam instrument atomic number 82. "So we have gotten everything from careful scientific-type processing to incredibly whimsical works of art. And so it's a niggling bit, for you, a buyer-beware situation."
Notwithstanding, she said, "nosotros're all in, in the sense that I don't take a team of scientists and image processors waiting in the wings in example the public doesn't show upwardly. We don't accept a budget, nosotros don't have staff or anything like that. So we are entirely, 100 percent, relying on the public. And some of them have done fabulous piece of work."
Juno is the first spacecraft to exist sent into an orbit around Jupiter'southward poles, and JunoCam was designed primarily to capture detailed images of the planet'due south heretofore unseen polar regions.
Because of weight, volume and power restrictions, the spacecraft could non support an advanced telescopic photographic camera. Instead, it was equipped with a relatively elementary imager with what amounts to a fish-eye lens. Malin Space Science Systems provided a similar camera to photo the Curiosity rover'due south descent to Mars.
While JunoCam is not as powerful as the sophisticated telescopes and sensors launched aboard other NASA probes, Juno's elliptical orbit carries it closer to Jupiter than any other spacecraft, within a few one thousand miles of the giant planet's deject tops. As a result, JunoCam'southward broad-angle views provide exceptional detail and more context than more than powerful narrow-angle instruments.
Only how realistic are the public's interpretations of JunoCam images? With other NASA spacecraft, the viewer can have confidence the photos were processed and reviewed by scientifically competent team members and that the images reverberate some sort of scientific reality.
With public processing, as Hansen said, it'south more a case of heir-apparent beware, and the relatively bland raw images lend themselves to Photoshop-blazon manipulation. To Hansen, the line between a scientifically accurate epitome and one that takes liberties with the data is "the minute you depart from true color."
"The minute yous start making the blueish a niggling bluer and the red a picayune redder, now yous've enhanced the color. And when yous really get to the sort of wild ends of the color palette, then I would telephone call it exaggerated. If you're but plain making upward things, then it's faux color.
So should viewers wanting to acquire more near Jupiter adopt realistic lighting and color to enhanced or exaggerated images?
"Let me argue against that," she said. "Our human eye-brain combination is better at seeing details that are there when you lot exaggerate information technology a bit, when you enhance it a fleck. The details, you can see (them) if you know what you lot're looking for in the true color images. But information technology'southward and then subtle, it's really, like, washed out. I would say nosotros learn a lot by looking at enhanced color images because it pops more to the eye-brain philharmonic."
Raw images from JunoCam are posted on a website Hansen helps manage. Each raw image includes the aforementioned view shot in dark-green, blue and ruddy filters and and then a slightly processed colour view that is a combination of all three. The public can download those images, process them in a wide variety of means and upload the results back to the website.
As long as the processed images chronicle to Jupiter, and don't contain unrelated or objectionable material, they are re-posted and available for anyone to download. All are in the public domain, although uploaders can opt to restrict commercial usage.
Hansen cited several processors for their work, including Björn Jónsson, who she said goes to great lengths to ensure realistic lighting and colour, and Seán Doran, a graphic artist whose enhanced images are "incredibly beautiful, they are drop-dead gorgeous."
Gerald Eichstädt, a mathematician and software developer, devised code to ensure compatible lighting across an image, Hansen said, adding "I'm urging him to write up an actual science paper and get some credit for all that piece of work, at least in the scientific community."
In an email exchange with CBS News, Doran said his images are based on Eichstädt's piece of work, calculation "my aim is to provide an aesthetic enhancement to what he has done."
"I utilize a range of techniques in Photoshop to extract detail and enhance subtleties in the source image," he wrote. "This tin can develop into quite a large prepare of actions and layers each with different not-destructive adjustments and masks. These layers are treated with various blend modes to provide effectively control in mixing toward the final image.
"I also utilize exposure settings to draw the eye and give book to the epitome. Knowing when to stop is intuitive, and in some cases I volition scrap what I have done and kickoff over again."
He said he was "inspired" by the work of Jönsson and Justin Cowart, "whose images provide realistic renderings of Jupiter. Their work is beautiful."
Last Mon, Juno flew over Jupiter's Cracking Red Spot for the beginning time, a highly anticipated event. The Peachy Red Spot is the largest, nearly powerful storm in the solar system, stretching more than 10,000 miles across. Inside minutes of the first raw images being posted, image processors around the earth began uploading their interpretations.
"People must take been only sitting there waiting with Photoshop open!" Hansen laughed. "Inside 45 minutes, I already had a queue to approve. This has actually been fun."
Said Doran: "We are but at the showtime of coming to grips with this data, and in time I expect to see very many beautiful and harmonious treatments."
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/07/15/jupiter-images-thrill-inspire-public-participation/
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