New Horizons

[lajoswinkler]

Can't get true colour without a green filter. Unless you're deuteranopoic colour blind, anyway.

It seems to be perfectly capable of capturing enough channels for the mission control to synthetize real color images. It would be retarded to send a probe to a such place without such capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=New_Horizons#Science_payload

[Sky_walker]

It seems to be perfectly capable of capturing enough channels for the mission control to synthetize real color images. It would be retarded to send a probe to a such place without such capability.

Well, that's what they basically did.

Their "color" images are de facto a composites of panchromatic + narrow wavelength red & blue. Green channel is created by subtracting other colors from panchromatic image, therefore it's not really green. It basically contains everything in wavelenght spectrum with exception of subtracted filters.

It's good enough for public, but if you really want to know how it looks like in full colors - New Horizons won't tell you that.

[Camacha]

It seems to be perfectly capable of capturing enough channels for the mission control to synthetize real color images. It would be retarded to send a probe to a such place without such capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=New_Horizons#Science_payload

For the love of Jeb, please not this discussion again. We know how you feel about it, but pointing it out every. single. time. the topic is something remotely related gets boring somewhat quickly. I prefer not to get moderators in here to intervene, as they tend to close down valuable threads rather than to repair things.

[Kryten]

It seems to be perfectly capable of capturing enough channels for the mission control to synthetize real color images. It would be retarded to send a probe to a such place without such capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=New_Horizons#Science_payload

Then I suppose that makes APL retarded. There's the filters I gave above, and that's the only instrument with any colour capability in the visible range. LORRI is monochromatic and Alice can only detect UV.

[Camacha]

Then I suppose that makes APL retarded. There's the filters I gave above, and that's the only instrument with any colour capability in the visible range. LORRI is monochromatic and Alice can only detect UV.

Good, APL is retarded. Moving on. That documentary is pretty neat, NASA does a proper job keeping people involved and interesting. Somehow I feel ESA needs to take notice just a little bit more.

[kurja]

Speaking of pluto / photographs, do you guys remember the SpaceNow fellow who claimed to have developed a method for acquiring images of pluto, charon et al small & distant objects so detailed he could see surface detail - using an amateur telescope? 'Hidden Micro Image Retrieval' it was called, or HMIR. I wonder if he's still up abd around defending his pictures? At least the site is still up.

[Camacha]

Speaking of pluto / photographs, do you guys remember the SpaceNow fellow who claimed to have developed a method for acquiring images of pluto, charon et al small & distant objects so detailed he could see surface detail - using an amateur telescope? 'Hidden Micro Image Retrieval' it was called, or HMIR. I wonder if he's still up abd around defending his pictures? At least the site is still up.

It would be pretty neat if he turns out to be correct

[Kryten]

It would be pretty neat if he turns out to be correct

Well, we're already close enough that we'd have seen his mountain if it existed. Wonder if he'll acknowledge that at all.

EDIT: The associated twitter account is still active, and he claims we actually have. Looks very much like an astronomy version of the infamous David Peters.

Edited June 13, 2015 by Kryten

[Kibble]

Then I suppose that makes APL retarded. There's the filters I gave above, and that's the only instrument with any colour capability in the visible range. LORRI is monochromatic and Alice can only detect UV.

But what about the true-colour photographs from the Jupiter system?

[Kryten]

But what about the true-colour photographs from the Jupiter system?

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/pics/032807.jpg

See original context for that image here; that image was produced using only the blue and methane narrow-band (IR) filters.

[smjjames]

Well, we're already close enough that we'd have seen his mountain if it existed. Wonder if he'll acknowledge that at all.

EDIT: The associated twitter account is still active, and he claims we actually have. Looks very much like an astronomy version of the infamous David Peters.

This David Peters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Peters_%28professor%29 A wiki search only came up with that guy and a minor politician from Massachusetts.

[kurja]

Well, we're already close enough that we'd have seen his mountain if it existed. Wonder if he'll acknowledge that at all.

EDIT: The associated twitter account is still active, and he claims we actually have. Looks very much like an astronomy version of the infamous David Peters.

...And hes' still as convinced as ever that Charon isn't round. =D

[lajoswinkler]

Well, that's what they basically did.

Their "color" images are de facto a composites of panchromatic + narrow wavelength red & blue. Green channel is created by subtracting other colors from panchromatic image, therefore it's not really green. It basically contains everything in wavelenght spectrum with exception of subtracted filters.

It's good enough for public, but if you really want to know how it looks like in full colors - New Horizons won't tell you that.

That is perfectly enough and for most intents and purposes it can be considered real. I don't know why most people here think I know nothing about how those photos were made. FFS, I already mentioned I was synthesizing color photos from monochromatic ones taken through various filters. I know how it's done.

I was pointing out to Kryten's claim that nothing of this sort will be possible. New Horizons has enough filters. It doesn't have as much as Dawn, which has at least six of them IIRC (if "it's not neccessary because of reasons", explain that, folks), but it has enough for the people working on it to produce a very decent approximation.

[Kryten]

This David Peters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Peters_%28professor%29 A wiki search only came up with that guy and a minor politician from Massachusetts.

This one. Self-professed palaeontologists who carefully examines grainy photos of fossils (mostly of pterosaurs), manipulates them in Photoshop, and comes up with huge areas of soft tissue preservation or extra bones nobody who's actually examined the fossils can see. He even has his own name for it, 'digital graphic segregation'.

[YNM]

About the HMIR thing: that's called lucky imaging. You see stars, when your equipment is really "resolve"-ing then you'll notice airy rings and "seeing". The "seeing" can only be truely removed with removing the air (so, space telescope) or AO, or using several telescopes (interferometry).

From Earth, Pluto looks (maximally) only ~0.1" - Hubble's maximum resolution is ~0.01". A 14 in diameter telescope (as the creator said in the site) would yield a maximum resolving power of ~0.39". Well... Near enough, but even then I doubt the pixels. The CCD (each pixels are square, area 7.4 square μm) can only resolve 0.16" per pixels, with plate scale of 0.06 "/μm... I'm thinking really good after processing.

--------

For lack of color photos on New Horizons (which means for Pluto high-res) : Why ? They get spectra for instance... Hopefully it's going to do a lot with getting spectra of interesting features ! (and correctly false-coloring it)

[smjjames]

About the HMIR thing: that's called lucky imaging. You see stars, when your equipment is really "resolve"-ing then you'll notice airy rings and "seeing". The "seeing" can only be truely removed with removing the air (so, space telescope) or AO, or using several telescopes (interferometry).

From Earth, Pluto looks (maximally) only ~0.1" - Hubble's maximum resolution is ~0.01". A 14 in diameter telescope (as the creator said in the site) would yield a maximum resolving power of ~0.39". Well... Near enough, but even then I doubt the pixels. The CCD (each pixels are square, area 7.4 square μm) can only resolve 0.16" per pixels, with plate scale of 0.06 "/μm... I'm thinking really good after processing.

--------

For lack of color photos on New Horizons (which means for Pluto high-res) : Why ? They get spectra for instance... Hopefully it's going to do a lot with getting spectra of interesting features ! (and correctly false-coloring it)

As for lack of color photos, they aren't close enough to make it useful. Right now, it'd be as blurry as the monochrome images.

Edit: Well okay, it'd be useful to some extent (I recall there were color photos from Hubble), but to be really useful, they need to get closer.

[Kryten]

For lack of color photos on New Horizons (which means for Pluto high-res) : Why ? They get spectra for instance... Hopefully it's going to do a lot with getting spectra of interesting features ! (and correctly false-coloring it)

Only imaging spectrometer is an extreme UV one for the atmosphere. Given the speed and distance of the flyby, and the illumination levels at pluto, getting spectra in the visual spectrum at reasonable resolution would be incredibly difficult.

[YNM]

Only imaging spectrometer is an extreme UV one for the atmosphere. Given the speed and distance of the flyby, and the illumination levels at pluto, getting spectra in the visual spectrum at reasonable resolution would be incredibly difficult.

There's another one for infrared in Ralph, called LEISA. Considering MVIC (the other CCD in Ralph) is for visible images, I wonder where the grating is, before flip apperture or after ? (also, AFAIK CCD can't differ IR, Visible and UV photons. Maybe something to do with it's placement and width so it's IR ? Or a filter ?)

And one more: maybe you just pointed out why they take monochromes only. Filters reduce the count and the rate of count increase, maybe that's why they chose only R and B ?

Edited June 14, 2015 by YNM

[kurja]

About the HMIR thing: that's called lucky imaging. You see stars, when your equipment is really "resolve"-ing then you'll notice airy rings and "seeing". The "seeing" can only be truely removed with removing the air (so, space telescope) or AO, or using several telescopes (interferometry).

From Earth, Pluto looks (maximally) only ~0.1" - Hubble's maximum resolution is ~0.01". A 14 in diameter telescope (as the creator said in the site) would yield a maximum resolving power of ~0.39". Well... Near enough, but even then I doubt the pixels. The CCD (each pixels are square, area 7.4 square μm) can only resolve 0.16" per pixels, with plate scale of 0.06 "/μm... I'm thinking really good after processing.

Considering that the detail his pictures show is greater than the theoretical maximum resolving power of the telescope yielding more detail off of his 14" scope than what can be seen with Hubble space telescope, I wouldn't call his processing 'really good', 'really creative' would be more like it. Anyone can fudge around in photoshop to whatever end they want but few have the gall to state that the result would have anything to do with reality.

[YNM]

Considering that the detail his pictures show is greater than the theoretical maximum resolving power of the telescope yielding more detail off of his 14" scope than what can be seen with Hubble space telescope, I wouldn't call his processing 'really good', 'really creative' would be more like it. Anyone can fudge around in photoshop to whatever end they want but few have the gall to state that the result would have anything to do with reality.

Well, the mountain could be an artifact... Bright pixels which were spread out ? And yeah, I meant to type "really good" instead of just really good.

[Aanker]

I am so hyped by this.

[ChrisSpace]

I am so hyped by this.

Me too!

[Herr Rictus Bingo]

Latest news from New Horizon Probe preparing the "rendez-vous" with Pluto, here you can find information.

Some new "photos" of the planet.

I'm restless about this event this planet is a bit mysterious And ... Hail the probe !

[PakledHostage]

here you can find information.

You can also find more information here.

[Fel]

Silly PakledHostage, any mouse would tell you, two threads are better than one!