Some antiscientists never learn.
Of course, if they did, they wouldn’t still be antiscientists.
I present to you one Ted Twietmeyer. He is a contributor to Rense.com, a webby bastion of poor thinking, bad evidence, breathless speculation, and out-and-out nonsense. Twietmeyer, you may recall, made some incredibly ridiculous claims about an Apollo picture, and back in January I wrote how I was able to shut down his goofy NASA conspiracy theory in about 30 seconds of using teh googles.
Surprise! He’s at it again. And surprise! 30 seconds of Googling shows he’s wrong again.
This time — of course — he’s frothing about Phoenix and claiming NASA is covering up the real images. Take a moment to shut down some brain cells and read what he wrote. In a nutshell, his big complaint is that the images are not in color. Yes, that’s the huge NASA conspiracy: they’re sending black and whites, and not color glossies.
But first, let’s dissect the idea that the images are not in color. The first images we saw from Phoenix were greyscale (not "MONOCROME" [sic] as Twietmeyer claims). That means we saw images that were shades of grey, and no color. The image shown here on the left, for example, is one of the earliest Phoenix sent back, showing a part of one of its solar panels and a small patch of Martian surface. It’s indeed lacking color. Why?
Phoenix — and almost all modern space probes — use cameras that are digital detectors called CCDs. These are basically computer chips that are sensitive to light. When a photon hits a part of the chip, it is converted into a charge, and the amount of charge that builds up tells the chip how much light hit it. But all the CCD can do is count photons. It can’t really tell a red photon from a blue one; all it knows is how much light hit it.
The way to produce color is to trick the CCD. You put a red filter in front of it, for example, and that lets only red photons through. You do that again using a green filter, and then a blue one, taking three images in all. Then you can add the three images together, producing a color image (there are a lot of details to this of course, which you can read about here, here, and here).
That’s a lot of picture taking, and then a lot of post-processing to get the colors right! So of course, when we land a probe on a planet for the first time, scientists are perfectly happy to wait for extra images to be sent back, for people to process them, then to make them into color, and finally to display them…
Pbbbbbt. Duh. Of course they don’t do that. They take a bunch of images without a filter (or maybe through just one filter) and send them back immediately so scientists and engineers can assess the status of the probe. Color information is cool, and even in many cases useful, but not right away! It’s more important to just find out what’s going on with the lander.
That’s why the pictures first seen weren’t color. Had Twietmeyer actually done any research at all (or — GASP — talked to someone who actually knows about this stuff) he would have found that out right away. But it’s easier to spin ridiculous conspiracy theories.
About this, he says:
What we saw today is a dramatic replay of the Viking lander more than 30 years ago, complete with another image of the spacecraft’s foot and a view of the horizon. But those images broadcast more than 30 years ago from Mars were in COLOR. But not images in 2008! Who can believe this nonsense?
Well, I couldn’t agree with his last sentence more! But maybe not in the way he means. And irony alert: the first images sent back from Viking were greyscale! It wasn’t until the next day that the first color images were produced. How did I find all this out? By typing "first viking pictures" into Google.
But then, I have a PhD in astronomy. I’m highly trained in the intertubes.
Second irony alert: color images were sent back from Phoenix within a day or two of landing as well.
Twietmeyer goes on and on about this. As a caption to an image from Phoenix, he says:
First black and white May 25, 2008 image of Martian arctic landscape, taken from jpl-nasa NASA website. This is claimed to be a “raw image before processing.” But JPL-NASA doesn’t say just what the processing does.
OOoooooo, JPL doesn’t say what "processing" means! That must mean conspiracy! Puhhhlease. Anyone who has worked in astronomical digital imagery knows exactly what processing means. The images right off the chip aren’t very pretty, or even useful. There are cosmic ray hits, calibration issues, electronic noise from the camera itself, problems with telemetry (dropouts) and so on. These are all known problems, and can be taken care of using some image manipulation techniques. That may sound like the images are being fiddled with, but it’s actually a fairly rigorous technique to turn the raw data into something you can actually analyze. I’ve written about this many, many times. But as Twietmeyer clearly believes, why do any actual research when it’s so much easier to make conspiracy claims?
I expect we’ll be seeing more silly claims like this, not fewer, the more probes we send to space. It’s frustrating to have to deal with this kind of irrationality… especially when these very pictures we see represent the height, the pinnacle, of rationality: our ability to use science to send machines to other worlds and send back data. It took a vast amount of clear thinking to be able to do that, and people like Twietmeyer are trying very hard to tear that down.
And they will, no doubt, always have an audience. But when you hear some claim about conspiracies, ask yourself: does the person talking have any real experience in this field? Have they done any research to back up their claims? Are they telling me the whole story? What are they leaving out?
And in many cases, such as this one, they are leaving out the evidence, the background, the research, the investigation, the science, and above all, the critical thinking and logic to back up what they claim. All they leave in is the hot air and wild speculation, and that’s not how you find the truth.
Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee Skyhound for letting me know about this.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Be careful about waving that PhD around, the morons love to make fun of you for having it; happens to me all the time, but then I do live in Southern-what-century-is-this West Virginia.
I was anxiously awaiting color photos as well, but the lack of them in my mind wasn’t due to conspiracy, it was due to, well, exactly what you said. But then the grayscales are beautiful in their own right, heavy contrasts and all. Maybe this re-re is simply used to those awesome Hubble photos or something and has become a bit spoiled. But anyway, I’m waiting for the results of soil analysis. Eagerly, yet patiently, awaiting.
So is the analysis done yet? No? CONSPIRACY!
May 29th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Gosh Phil, these conspiracy theorists are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. And, as you point out, they aren’t doing even the most cursory of Google searching on their own.
Besides it being more work to make a color picture, color pictures also eat up a bit more data to transmit (at least three times the data, assuming no compression). Maybe Twietmeyer is under the illusion that because he has a broadband Internet connection at home, so too must the landers on Mars; I don’t know. Truth is, the bandwidth is rather limited when you’re communicating across hundreds of millions of miles, and it does take appreciably longer to send back the color information in an image than just the pure grayscale. And when you’ve just landed on a planet, and you simply want to make sure that all of your equipment is in working order, grayscale images are good enough. And you can transmit more of them in the same amount of time versus full color photographs.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:50 am
But all the CCD can do is count photons. It can’t really tell a red photon from a blue one; all it knows is how much light hit it.
The way to produce color is to trick the CCD. You put a red filter in front of it, for example, and that lets only red photons through. You do that again using a green filter, and then a blue one, taking three images in all. Then you can add the three images together, producing a color image
I know this is a bit offtopic, but I explained this to my dad recently because I read it here a while ago. Thing is we weren’t talking about astronomy, but about consumer-end cameras. Now, after I gave this talk to my dad, I got a little doubt and checked on wikipedia and found this. So, if I do understand this correctly, there are CCDs that can detect certain colours but they aren’t used in astronomy?
If so, why not? (I guess, it’s quality and the fact that they also use filters for UV and/or IR)
Any ideas on the subject?
May 29th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I was thinking CCDs had arrays of red, blue and green pixels, and the layered sort was a fairly new evolution of the technology.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Why the hell would I want to put in effort thinking through all that
May 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
“…twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us…”
Is this what he’s looking for?
You can get anything you want…
May 29th, 2008 at 10:56 am
BA:
While your explanation is quite accurate (Neil Armstrong’s first step was in B/W, too – we had to wait for color images), it doesn’t really address the question of why the color filter method is used. I had assumed it was a bandwidth issue, but is it instead a flexibility issue? By using different filters scientists can obtain more information than is possible with, say, your standard cell-phone camera? In either event, the choice not to include a standard color camera is a no-brainer.
This reminds me of something cool about the Viking mission. The cameras were slow-scan, and one was used to take a group photo of the mission team. The camera was slow enough that those on one side got up and left while the camera photographed the others.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:56 am
… even conspiracies in black and white…
May 29th, 2008 at 10:59 am
There are CCDs that can do color — your typical digital camera from a department store can do that. But they use special techniques like having an array of three color pixels instead of just a simple array of pixels, or they can be layered. But these aren’t good for space use; they have to be hardened against radiation, they aren’t as sensitive, they don’t have the same spatial resolution.
They’re also just more complicated and more expensive, and we simply don’t need to be that fancy. It’s better to have a single array of pixels on a chip, then have a bunch of filters that parse out the light. That way, you can have lots of filters that do different things (like let through just light from ionized hydrogen, or a molecular band, or whatever). That gives the scientists more freedom to do science, which is, after all, why we send these probes out!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am
“But then, I have a PhD in astronomy. I’m highly trained in the intertubes.”
Is that because of all the great internet astronomy tools like ADS, SIMBAD, NED, and yes, even teh Google itself? Or is that because grad students spend way too much time surfing the web and not working on their thesis?
I knew how CCDs worked in astronomy, but I’ve never given much thought on how that translates to our near-instantaneous color pictures on our personal digital cameras… so I went to HowStuffWorks. Fascinating! \end{tangent}
From the anti-science website:
“The woman interviewing a project engineer eventually asked, “Will we be seeing color images?” The answer was “Yes indeed, we will be seeing color images [short pause here in his voice] in the future.”
Conspiracies in every pause? No, she just had to think about how long it would take to process, but since those damn grad students are reading blogs again, who knows when it’ll get done…
May 29th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Not only does that make a ton of sense, it makes me want such a camera and a set of filters.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Rense is also a bastion for holocaust deniers. Always keep that in mind when dealing with these people. A lot of them are neo-Nazis, and that isn’t just hyperbole.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:07 am
@Jorg
What I got from that is that there are tiny color filters above the CCD chip itself, thus the physical mechanism for detecting photons on the chip is still not color dependent. But I may be reading it too simply.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:13 am
>>But then, I have a PhD in astronomy. I’m highly trained in the intertubes.
Could not help but laugh out loud.
SRM
May 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Some other points about the difference between consumer grade CCDs and the ones used on space probes, with pre-filtered CCDs in RGB you’re only getting 1/3 the data for each color. With one “full spectrum” detector and filters, you can get full resolution data for which ever spectra you want.
Another issue is that space probes want to image in more than just “Red”, “Blue” and “Green”. If you wanted 8 different wavelengths, you’d be getting 1/8th the data per wavelength. Again, with filters instead of specialized CCD pixels you get full resolution data no matter how many wavelengths you want the ability to look at.
The Phoenix SSI has 12 different wavelength filters available (IIRC):
http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/SSI_filter.html
May 29th, 2008 at 11:15 am
So how do they expect to see the Martians? By the time they have taken all those pictures, they will have walked off.
Oh wait! It’s part of teh Conspiracy!
Seriously, though, I would expect that you would get much better resolution with a lot of tiny detectors that see all photons than with the detectors split up between three images, as they would be in a digital camera.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Darn! Guysmiley beat me to the “send” button!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Rense.com, the website toward which Phil links, is also a hotbed of revisionists and Holocaust deniers (You know the style: “Zyklon-B was only used to delouse Jewish deportee and fight Typhus”). Strange how the stupid and the kooks tend to gravitate toward one another on the web!
Still, I was also wondering about the greyscale pictures from Phoenix. Now I know, so I guess there IS a silver lining!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:22 am
(sigh…
For the LAST TIME, people, these paranoid conspiracy theories are completely baseless! There are absolutely NO jack-booted thugs lurking around the country to pull you away from your keyboa
May 29th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Never ceases to amaze me how much airtime the wackos get – I think Phil is right that they will always find and audience for this nonsense.
I remember when I saw the YOUTUBE vid where the guy had stalked Buzz Aldrin and badgered him about the moon conspiracy fiasco. I cheered when Buzz just punched the guy right in the nose!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I think the problem is that the general public always associate progress with better, bigger, shinier or whatever and therefore find it hard to understand that taking a series of greyscale images through filters provides a wealth more information than taking a single color image. Black and white is old man, we want color and 10 second sound bites!
The number of times I’ve taken a quick picture with my rather fancy digital SLR (Nikon D80) and then uploaded it to my laptop and wondered “are my walls really that color?”. Fancy isn’t necessarily better.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:41 am
NASA can’t win with these jokers. If they held the pictures back until after processing, they would then be accused of hiding the truth until it can be doctored.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Nicole: “What I got from that is that there are tiny color filters above the CCD chip itself, thus the physical mechanism for detecting photons on the chip is still not color dependent. But I may be reading it too simply.”
Yes, that’s right – you are not reading it too simply. Many CCD chips (e.g., those designed for low-light security cameras which amateur astronomers often use) come in two versions: black-and-white and colour. The only difference is that the colour ones have the filter layer on the front.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I’m not sure if this is nitpicking or confusion, but in what sense is grayscale not monochrome? Monochrome means “one color”, not “one brightness”.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Just for fun, I checked out the rest of the Rense site. OMG, I don’t believe that garbage. No, that’s not right… I mean… GARBAGE!!! I got a headache from reading just one sliver of that tripe. I feel… tainted now, poluted. Eeeck, I am going over to the Phoenix site now to see if I can get some of this out of me. Maybe I’ll look at those “processed” photos.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:53 am
>>But then, I have a PhD in astronomy. I’m highly trained in the intertubes.
Ooh. does that make you elite? ’cause y’all know that elite=inequitable=unamerican=terrorist.
>>OOoooooo, JPL doesn’t say what “processing” means!
JPL, Freemasons, same thing.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Pssssh. You know what’s fake about this? A *real* conspiracy theorist couldn’t possibly have a website, because he’d have realized by now that “they” are using computers to control our brain waves. I think that Phil made up this alleged website so he’d have something to write about!
Seriously though, I think it’s tremendously telling that Phil’s banner ads are for colleges, and Resne’s are for canned fruit to use in one’s fallout shelter.
Oh, and since you didn’t mention it yourself here, the three-filter technique used by the Martian landers is the same principle as was used in Technicolor films.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Tim, I had to check out youtube to see that punch. Glad I did. Great punch by Buzz Aldrin. Very entertaining!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Another reason to take filtered greyscale photos is that the Bayer filter (RGRGRG… on one row, GBGBGB… on the next, and so on)
1) reduces the effective resolution of the resulting image
2) restricts the camera to ONLY red/green/blue filtering, and
3) results in some spatial chromatic aliasing that muddies the image down.
If you’re a scientist (and I’m pretty sure the guys at JPL are), you really want to take a series of full resolution photos through full-lens filters, because let’s face it, there’s really not much going on up there that requires full color instant snaps.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
To Naked Bunny with a Whip:
Monochrome means one intensity of black and one intensity of white. A pixel is either black or white. Greyscale means there can be various intensities of black to white, kind of like a sliding scale of white to black, with all the intensities in between.
- Mikel
May 29th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for the explanation about the color’s regarding pictures! It answered a lot for me.
Whenever I read articles with pictures (astronomy!), I never understood why the pictures were always refered to as ‘false color’ or something filtered…AND why there were B&W pictures so often!
Geez… maybe they DID land on the Moon after all !?!?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
As an Extra class amateur radio operator, I am always amazed by the small signal radio techniques NASA uses to communicate with their landers. I feel very good when I can communicate with less than five watts here on earth with a fairly large wire dipole. Immagine doing it from Mars on solar power!
How many bonus points would they get for field day?
Jeff
May 29th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Random possibly unrelated to the color/grayscale issue but what is the data rate for that thing?
Also Phil is right about filters. Particularly on-chip filters. One of the strong points of Leica’s DMR digital camera back was that it did NOT have an anti-aliasing filter. Cleaner source image.
Also an analog… analog. *ahem* Kodachrome film. Most slide films have dyecouplers already on the emulsion layer. This is fine and dandy and essentially equates to a full-collor CCD.
Kodachrome is 3 layers of high-res black and white. No dye couplers on board. This is essentially like taking three black and white shots at the same time and then processing color into them later.
The results are well-known. Kodachrome is (still) considered to be an archival film.
But the point here isn’t one of technical features. The point is that this man has too much time on his hands. Sometimes halftones are just halftones. And you get a better image later if you are willing to wait.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
KC:
I’ve seen pictures made by such cameras, where people got up after their picture was take, ran around (behind the camera) and joined the people at the other end, thereby appearing twice in the photos.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
When you’re in space, every pixel is precious but especially with a lander, you have plenty of time for each image. If you use a color array, you get less total data because the same imaging area has to divide the red, blue, and green light. Using a grayscale detector, you get much more imaging area, and adding filters, you have the luxury of using every single pixel in every color band. No big deal to take the same picture 3 (or 12) times and then combine the data – it’s not like trying to take pictures of a child where the picture will be totally different a minute later.
In addition, we know that Mars is red. We need Blue and Green, but having specific filters at specific wavelengths allows the scientists to look for specific minerals and make far better guesses about chemical composition. RGB as calibrated for earth usage is not as interesting as specific wavelengths designed for Mars.
In the end, it’s not like dropping off a roll of film at the drugstore. Only the people who run the camera can get data out and then interpret it into an image. You have to trust them that they’re giving you what they say they are. The camera is just a computer. If they want to, they can upload pictures of Pluto cavorting on the surface (risking copyright infringement) and then release those as data. There’s no real way to prove that the image isn’t of the surface.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Wow, he also says that the images are already in colour, and are being processed to remove the colour because NASA doesn’t want the public to find out that Mars’ sky is blue.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Ack! This lunatic hails from my neck of the woods, apparently…
I’d been thinking about moving anyhow…
May 29th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I take exception to your correcting Mr. Twietmeyer’s spelling, and hense distorting his meaning. He clearly stated that the photos were MONOCROME, not monochrome. MONOCROME is the outdated imaging format used in the moon “landings” and the Viking photos. NASA and JPL have had decades to come up with a new format suitable for soundstage and blue-sky Mars environments, and it is ridiculous that they won’t develop something to replace the old Apollo XI/Capricorn I cameras. This is the twenty-first century! NASA is draining the federal coffers as we speak… shouldn’t we have higher expectations?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Not all the guys at JPL are scientists. It takes engineers to design and build the equipment, and usually to man the consoles since they are responsible for the systems on Mars. Engineers build and operate the neat toys and the scientists have the fun with the data (and telling the controllers what do shoot, what to do, and where to go – take that as you will.)
In Apollo 11, there was no initial plan the send a tv camera but everyone decided it was a good idea. The color wheel was also used in later missions becauseit worked better. Naturally, the govt. decided to adopt the “other” present day system. It still works better.
I know, and am uncomfortable with, a number of anti-evolutionsts and most are NOT neo-nazis. Some are nice if deluded folks. I understand that somce scientists may be neo-homosexuals. So? I hate to see people defend science by using immaterial data.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
dre, I can’t find any info on MONOCROME formatting for Apollo. Do you know any links?
I did in fact misspell his use of the word; however, given that he uses ALL CAPS in the same sentence to highlight words (instead of using HTML coding which would make sense… oh wait, what am I thinking?) it’s an honest mistake. I’ll correct the spelling, but not the intent until I learn more.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Geezâ?¦ maybe they DID land on the Moon after all !?!?
The Apollo images were taken with film cameras (Hasselblads to be specific). They alternated between color and B&W rolls as needed.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-hass.html
May 29th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I noticed he was pushing his books. I’m thinking that looking up the facts would only get in the way of sales.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
We could put people like Twietmeyer in a spacecraft with big windows, shoot them to the moon and let them exit the craft and walk on the surface and they would deny they are there.
It’s an elaborate conspiracy to make people believe they took a spaceship to the moon but they’re really part of a really big Disney ride.
Once we drop them on the moon’s surface, maybe we should just leave them there since they believe they aren’t there anyway. If they’re right they won’t have to walk far to find the exit.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
NASA is draining the federal coffers as we speak… shouldn’t we have higher expectations
Uh, no. NASA’s budget accounts for 0.6% of the National Budget. That’s six-tenths of one percent (!).
May 29th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
BA:
Your descriptions of filters to achieve color reminds me of the old “Technicolor” three-color process used from 1934 through the 1950s. It used four negatives of which one was black & white (sometimes tinted sepia,) providing subtle background richness and depth. Remember how wonderfully vivid and subtle all the colors look in “The Wizard of Oz”, “Robin Hood” and those musicals? I recall once seeing actual samples of the color negatives which looked red, blue and green, though a yellowish green. The base negative was a brownish-b&w. It was all mechanically done with special cameras, lenses and chemistry. Completely alien to today’s digital technology yet using the same understanding of scientific properties of light to produce a color image.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Another reasons spacecraft use filters rather than RGB CCDs is data volume. There’s a limited amount of storage space on the spacecraft for data. (Cassini, NASA’s largest interplanetary mission, makes do with about 3 Gb. Yes: *bits*, not bytes.) Furthermore, there’s a bottleneck when it comes time to downlink the data: it takes hours with the 35-meter or 70-meter dishes in the Deep Space network to download that rather small amount of data. (And you’re not guaranteed the larger dishes, even for large missions. At this moment, Cassini isn’t using the 70-meter dishes because Phoenix has all the time when they’re pointed toward Mars and Saturn.) So data volume is at a premium on spacecraft (we have to trim or cut a lot of observations because of it) and therefore you don’t *want* to be always acquiring 3 times the data per image by design. In any case, changing filters and re-imaging is generally not problematic, except during high-speed flybys.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I read the link and got bored with it quickly but one thing makes me wonder (other than the fact he’s a raving nutcase) why does he believe that NASA are perpetrating a fraud in the first place ?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
“Technically, there is NO reason for these live images to not be in color except for one major reason – people will realize that Mars isn’t red after all, but it has a blue sky almost identical to that of Earth”
Oh my, NASA is at it again. This time it’s the great Martian Color Conspiracy. Mars isn’t red! NASA (not to mention every astronomer since Galileo) has been duping us into thinking it’s red. It’s actually a shade of muave. That guy is a complete loony tune. Is this the same guy who had the video about LHC, Nibiru, etc., etc.? It sounds like the same guy.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I was just kidding about MONOCROME. Twietmeyer can’t spell. And I know NASA isn’t spending that much of my taxes. Cheney is spending all of it on virgin blood for his daquiries!
May 29th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
*scratches his head* I guess I and everyone I’ve ever discussed images with for the past quarter century has been using the word “monochrome” wrong, then, along with Wikipedia and every dictionary I’ve checked today.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
The best estimate I’ve seen is that the Phoenix mission cost ~ $400,000,000. Every time I hear somebody griping about the ‘exorbitant’ cost of a specific mission, I simply figure the cost, divide by the US population (300,000,000) and ‘refund’ their share of that mission – in this case about $1.33.
I’ve also ‘refunded’ some people their entire yearly contribution to NASA – $50.00.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Uh oh. There is an image on the Phoenix website that the wackos are going to use to prove their idiocy.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/sizes-sol3-v8.html
The shadow of the camera mast makes it look like the camera is pointed in a different direction, 90 degrees away from where the picture is taken. So, obviously, the whole thing is faked and Phoenix is in the desert. No wonder NASA de-colorizes the photos. The sky IS blue because it’s Earth. END SARCASM
May 29th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Ah, dre, I was wondering! But I didn’t sense the sarcasm.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Is it appropriate to note the irony of Mr Twit’s name?
May 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Long time no post, but even if his spelling is wrong, his use of “monochrome” is perfectly correct. Greyscale is monochromatic, as is sepia-tone, etc. Monochrome simply means there is no color information, only luminance information, or (more correctly) that the entire image is of a single hue. Think in HSL, not RGB/CYM.
Just because MSPaint uses the term “monochrome” to refer to 1-bit, black-and-white images (they *are* monochrome) doesn’t mean it’s the only correct usage.
If you do a Google search for “define: Monochrome”, you will find a couple definitions of “two-color”, but you will also see many definitions of “many shades of one color”.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
As per Calvin and Hobbes, Mars hasn’t yet changed from black and white.
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/political-economy-of-calvin-and-hobbes-1.html
I guess the images turn into color as they get closer to Earth.
Here’s the filter wheel inside Phoenix’s camera:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=84&cID=2
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/science_ssi.php
May 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Some folks prefer conspiracies to real life.. they find them more palatable, and in some weird way, easier to deal with. Whatever we do, we mustn’t confuse them with straightforward facts, or mundane explanation…
Clearly, it hasn’t occurred to Mr.Twittermeister, or whatever his name is, that NASA scientists are subject to peer review, just like other scientists, when publishing their work in scientific journals, and that much of NASA’s work is promulgated in this way. NASA may be funded by the US Government and the American taxpayer, but that does not mean that the work of NASA, and the science it does, is treated differently from any other science, by the world’s scientific community. Accordingly, NASA’s methodology, their results, and their interpretation of the scientific data they aquire is scrutinised most carefully by others, others who have no obligation to respect vested interests, indeed, have an obligation to themselves, and others, not to be swayed by any other consideration than the science itself.
Accordingly, NASA must be above reproach in reporting it’s results. Arguably, NASA is carrying out the most visible and publicly accessable science taking place in the world today, and I see no reason to doubt that it is doing so as carefully, objectively and scientifically as it is possible to do.
George Bolam
May 29th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
HA! Amazing. I have a few friends that are huge conspiracy nuts like this guy and would buy into this story in a heartbeat. I used to argue with two of them at the same time about the moon landing, alien face on mars, perpetual energy machines, etc etc (of course I was presenting the scientific facts )… and I learned something in the process. Arguing with these sorts of mentalities, even just bringing up the subject or responding to one of their ridiculous points of view, just made it worse.
These sorts of people have a mindset. They won’t back down no matter how many facts and sensible lines of reasoning you present to them. For example, I found after 10 years of repeating myself about the explanations for why there was no stars in the shots on the moon, that I was just going in circles. They just were not paying attention to the facts, but preferred the mystery of the conspiracy and so just ignored things they didn’t like. They would not tell you, but the fact you are repeating simple concepts to people, and they don’t get it, but at the same time make claim to really stupid theories that suggest facts that are far more difficult to prove, (due to their not being real) well it just made me aware of the pointlessness of arguing with them in the first place. So to this day I have pretty much, at most times, given up trying to correct these guys and people with the same mindset. One is still my friend (the other is a mental case, literally .. no surprise) and I find now I enjoy my time spent drinking a beer with him that much more pleasant when we don’t talk about conspiracy garbage.
Basically what I learned here: the more I talked or argued about it, the worse it got, so I gave up. I have learned if I want an idea to die, at least in my circles, I need to ignore it. A fair bit of the time it is the ‘argument’ they crave, and not the solution. Remove the argument, remove the problem.
It’s sort of like when a husband an wife are fighting over something for the sake of fighting. A lot of the time it gets to the stage that the arguments in the fight are so stupid and pointless that the couple just agree to stop. Stop arguing. It is getting nowhere.
Of course alot of these guys, that we think are nutcases, due to the baseless facts they are presenting, are many times, nothing more than a publicity stunt in order to gain attention so as to sell a book or something. With that in mind I would hate to think my arguing with them and fueling their illogical fire was ironically allowing them to earn more money selling the books they make due to the publicity they get.
ACK!
May 29th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
“OOoooooo, JPL doesn’t say what “processing” means! That must mean conspiracy! Puhhhlease.”
Hey, thanks for the reminder Phil, I got to pick up my prints from the “processer” on the way home (my vacation pictures). Do you think Dodd Camera is part of the conspiracy too?
May 29th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I am getting sick of all these NASA conspiracy theorists. Had a discussion with one of my friends the other day about the moon landing and showed him your site because it can explain it far better than I can. It ended with him saying I need to examine the facts and be skeptical.
Getting sick of conspiracy theorists in general, whether it’s vaccination conspiracies, HIV/AIDS conspiracies or WTC conspiracies. These people gives ’skeptics’ a bad name.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I don’t know if this has been touched on but there was a site I visited yesterday (in fact I think I found the link here) with more pics from the lander and there are a couple of what looks like an artists pallet with little circles of differing shades of grey. The caption near it mentioned that this was used to help process the image later because they took a picture of it on Earth before it left to be able to compare it to the different colors on Mars.
I think thats what it was anyways. This is always my first blog in the morning, always a great and insightful read. Thanks
May 29th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Well,
I’ve gotten to old to even want to listen (for a laugh) to these people.
What really burns me up is the fact that people that find and read this stuff often are not aware of the non-science history involved in this type of rumor mill….
Bad Astronomer…Keep it up and hope your sight gets more hits in the long run then these….Well I’ll let you fill that part out…
Keep looking up..Skyhound..
May 29th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
BA:
Thanks for the explanation on the type of CCD used.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Come to think of it, the blue Martian sky bit might trace back to an accident on the Viking mission. The first color pictures showed a blue sky. There was some “Oh wow: Mars has a blue sky!” until it was determined there was a color calibration error. The color swatches were partially colored with dust, and that made adjustment hard. Later the error was discovered and we had nice pictures of a tan/yellow Martian sky.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Phoenix even has color calibration targets on it. You can see it at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/3_cal_targets_001.html
These are patches where we know the colors since we made them. We can use the calibrations from these images when we process (da da dum!) the data.
And ah dohn’t nead kno fansee dahgree ta unnerstahnz it
May 29th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I bet the Pink Mars Bunny (PMB) has been tampering with the lander. It’s the only illogical explanation…
May 29th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Twitmeier is just another one of those lons who can’t contribute, so tries to tear down the achievement of others. Most conspiracy nuts, especially those who chase NASA fit into that category.
For those remembering the Aldrin punch of Bill Kaysing, there is a complete video “Astronauts gone wild” on (*ahem*) channel bittorrent). Al Bean gives him a complete serve too. In fact they all do, and Kaysing comes off as a complete loser.
May 29th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I had to explain post processing to a friend once when he said his little Kodak $300 camera gave a “more realistic” image than my $2000 Canon. He didn’t understand he was getting a processed image, and I was getting RAW data that was being post processed by my intentions, rather than the camera’s.
An interesting consumer-grade camera sensor technology that DOES use single-pixel three-level colour it the Foveon chip – not really very prevalent, but cameras that do use it “appear” to have very high megapixel count – because they multiply the “actual” rating by three! It is conceptually very similar to the aforementioned colour film substrates in that there are three levels to every pixel, each sensitive to one particular wavelength.
Canon also has some VERY high end stuff that use three seperate sensors – each one bearing a mask of a single colour. I know they do this in their quite expensive digital movie cams – not sure they have one for stills like that. Others probably do this as well, I only ran into the Canon while messing about with sensor technologies.
I must agree with the Monochrome/grey scale comments some have made above – though what I gather is GreyScale is more like a particular KIND of Monochrome – one that only uses a scale of light amplitude (no colour information at all). Either term would be “correct” when talking GreyScale particularly – it is like geosynchronous and geostationary – the latter being a special form of the former.
JC
May 29th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
The “monochrome” vs. “greyscale” distinction is common in the computer world (not just in MS Paint). Elsewhere, yes, “monochrome” can sometimes have a different connotation.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Sheesh. Even earthbound photographers do this. Yes, your digital camera has all of the image processing built in, but the good ones can also be told to save a so-called “raw” image, which is just the raw data out of the CCD. And serious photographers often take these raw images, download them to a desktop computer, and convert to color images there. http://www.ultimateslr.com/raw-image-software.php has a bunch of information on software to do that.
This is because a desktop computer can do a slightly better job than a computer than can fit into a battery-powered camera.
Now, say you’re designing a Mars probe. You want the highest quality possible images and you want to minimize the amount of computer and software that you send to Mars.
Will you convert to color on Mars, or send the raw data back to Earth and convert to color on Earth?
Gee, a simpler lander and better quality final images. What was the downside again? Oh, yes, confusing the stupid.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
>>I bet the Pink Mars Bunny (PMB) has been tampering with the lander. It’s the only illogical explanation…
But only under direct orders from the Flying Spaghetti Monster
May 29th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I do wonder, though, why they wouldn’t throw something equivalent to a consumer digital camera into the mix too, for the sole purpose of capturing images to be used in press releases. If we can get a $200 camera at Wal-Mart that takes decent images on Earth, you’d think NASA could find some way to include that type of technology on the landers and rovers for not too much more. And that way they could release color images to the press without the need to be “processed”, while still being fully capable of taking real photos for the mission. That might not silence the hardcore nuts, but it would give the public something to relate to, to see images taken with a similar kind of camera to the one they have at home. The color images I see (at least from the rovers) always feel like they’re losing something in the processing, or there are weird color bleeds like the three photos aren’t lining up quite right. I’d like to know this oddness is just because I’m looking at another planet, and not some byproduct of the image processing.
The quality of these images is a big part of the perceived success of the mission among the public, and having to launch into a huge technical explanation of why the pictures “look funny” doesn’t seem like a great way to address that. Make “impressing the public” one of the mission objectives. Give me the same pictures I’d get if I was a tourist on Mars, shooting out the window of the space bus with my Digital Rebel.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
quasidog: “Arguing with these sorts of mentalities, even just bringing up the subject or responding to one of their ridiculous points of view, just made it worse.”
Conspiracy theorists build their egos on the basis that they’re smarter than the smartest people in the world (not to mention most everyone else as well) on account of being able to see through their vast, impeccably organised and incredibly clever deceptions. Of course they won’t give that up; that would be a total admission that they’re absolutely nothing special.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
oh man.. I don’t have a phd but i did take a photography night class…covered digital photography in one evening and even that managed to show digi cams are essentially black and white and require filters to see colour (loads of tiny fixed filters over the sensors as opposed to one big interchangable filter but basically the same principle) You can even pick out the different filtered images from the raw data and construct your own colour images in much the same way as I did the 3D image on the other thread.
Boy this conspiracy guy isn’t even trying. The cartoon on the ‘comfort’ web site you blogged has a more convincing theory.
BTW it’s quite fun to take the raw colour data and just stick them into the different colour channels in photoshop. the results aren’t natural but thay’re well cool – looks a bit like the stargate sequence in 2001 a space odyssey.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I read this a few days ago on Rense. Ted’s been at this for years.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
“Technically, there is NO reason for these live images to not be in color except for one major reason – people will realize that Mars isn’t red after all, but it has a blue sky almost identical to that of Earth (which I proved with NASA images in my book.) Color image information is being sent to Earth right now, and there is no real reason whatsoever not to show these historic, polar images from Mars in black and white. Perhaps that’s was “processing” does to Mars images – it alters them look so they will look like what NASA thinks the public expects to see.”
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha <> hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh man.
Hilarious.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Click around on Ted Twietmeyers web site and you’ll find the books/cd’s for sale. I think this explains his stance quite well.
Technology advances, you no longer need a horse and cart to travel from town to town selling snakeoil, the Internet lets you do it all from the comfort of your own home.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:34 am
[...] Bad Astronomy Blog » The real Phoenix, in black and white Ouch my head hurts from all the debunking in this episode of someone somewhere is being stupid and thinking it’s a conspiracy you sneezing. (tags: science phoenix mars nasa conspiracy) [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Do any of the rest of you who teach astronomy spend any significant amount of class time explaining about light and color and how our eyes process them and how photography (both film and digital) work?
May 30th, 2008 at 1:54 am
And on the topic of color and vision, this recent bit of news is interesting:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080519-shrimp-colors.html
http://www.sciam.com/gallery_directory.cfm?photo_id=069D6490-016C-40DD-339CEC9062161889
May 30th, 2008 at 2:15 am
If they take individual pictures with different coloured filters, there is a large timing difference between the red, green and blue (or whatever filters they are using) pictures.
OK for stills, but not for anything that moves (no colour shots of sandstorms).
And, of course, the approaching, friendly waving martian will be in totally different positions in each of the shots, whitch makes editing him out much harder
May 30th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Scott Schrantz wrote:
“If we can get a $200 camera at Wal-Mart that takes decent images on Earth, you’d think NASA could find some way to include that type of technology on the landers and rovers for not too much more.”
Well, except that they would no longer work. Ever heard of the requirements for electronics in space, like, the need to be hardened against radiation or the electronic parts being capable to withstand vaccuum(Consumer level chips easily break in vaccum when the casing contains bubbles of air, which it usually does from the case molding process)? I’d wager that the US$200 cam from Whatevermart is not suitable for space travel.
“there are weird color bleeds like the three photos aren’t lining up quite right”
Yep. indeed. As the different coloured shots are taken one after another (maybe even with a slight break inbetween when the previous shot is transferred to earth to make romm for the next one), they can easily get misaligned. Remember: the whole construction is quite lightweight, so the camera is not mounted on a heavy granite slab for stability. even the sligt motion of the filters being replaced and the moving position of the sun (and therefor the moving shadows) throws the aligning off, therefor causing colour bleeds at the edges, especially when there is a sharp shadow involved.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:49 am
@Scott Schrantz: There is also the problem of data rates. Every picture taken needs the image data sent back to Earth along with all the non-image data. The data rates for Phoenix vary up to a maximum of only 128Kbps (bits not bytes) and then only when the orbiter is in range overhead. Thus the amount of time you have to send data of any sort is limited and thus better spent on data that can be used for more than just pretty pictures. Especially when it is usually only hours before the processed pretty pictures start appearing anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong with pretty pictures, quite the opposite in fact. Especially when it comes to space and astronomy, one of my favourite topics
, but we will still get them, just not as soon as we would like.
We also shouldn’t discount the extra cost, and not just financial, of getting a consumer level device hardened for spaceflight and use on Mars or properly integrated into the onboard systems. Even then, as with the hardened cameras already on board, the images would still likely need a fair degree of post processing to be even usable so they would still likely take as long to appear as they do now.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Consider this: Humans build a base on the moon in the next century. Perhaps connected to Earth via a space elevator for quick transport, and vacationing to the moon is a commercial success; hundreds of thousands of people do it each year.
The conspiracy theorists will claim that the hundreds of thousands of people who take pictures of their family in the Sea of Tranquility are NASA employees. The space elevator ends just above the atmosphere, to make it look like it goes all the way to the moon.
If the theorists get an offer from NASA, or MoonCorp or whoever runs the Number One Vacationing Spot in the Solar System (TM) to go there for free in order to stifle their claims once and for all, they will turn it down. Why? Conspiracy theorists are bored and prefer to make up a more mysterious explanation than to take the one given to them.
If someone made a website claiming that basketballs are made from baby skin, people would believe them because it’s more interesting than the truth. To them, this stuff is entertainment. The truth is simply too mundane. meh. What can ya do, eh?
May 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Actually this entry really takes me back! When the Viking probes were first on Mars, there was a plethora of articles where people thought they were seeing things in the photos… tracks, motion blurs, there was even a dust up (pun) about seeing what was apparently a beer can in the background. (Actually, it was a cylindrical camera cover that got popped off shortly after landing.)
How great is that? We finally get on Mars, and the first thing we do? Litter!
But the mention of how you filter B&W images to colorize them also brings up another memory: The first photos of Mars’ surface from Viking were incorrectly “color timed” so that the skies appeared blue. It wasn’t until they double checked the color rendition gainst a small test target on the lander itself did we realize just how alien the landscape looked: reddish pink skies, and deep rust surface.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:42 am
@Tom
“It’s actually a shade of mauve.”
Mauve means danger!
@Ronn
“Do any of the rest of you who teach astronomy spend any significant amount of class time explaining about light and color and how our eyes process them and how photography (both film and digital) work?”
I can tell you that as a TA, most of our professors go into light and color in their basic intro courses, but not enough talk about actual detection. In fact, we do even make the mistake of saying “using CCDs [brief explanation] similar to what’s in your digital camera.” Sometimes I think it is our inability to communicate all the material that we want the way we want that helps lead to such public misconceptions! I didn’t get a detailed description of the eye as a detector, or film and CCD techniques, until grad school classes.
And, wow, I thought our eyes were amazing. But apparently the mantis shrimp is kicking our butts!
May 30th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Ah, add-on… there are some higher level undergrad classes, like a techniques course, that describes light detection in more detail. But these aren’t the classes that the majority of students take to fill their science requirement.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:27 am
You smug ivory-tower intellectuals with all your intellectual, brainy, ivory-tower knowledge up in your intellectual ivory towers looking down on everyone beneath you like some sort of ivory-tower intellectual……..OOOH, LOOK, PUPPIES!!….
May 30th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
You’d think there’d be some astrophotographers to attest to the difficulty of achieving decent results.
Strap on of those $89.99 consumer digitals to a telescope and see if you can properly photograph.. say.. MARS and see if it even turns out RED.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I forwarded the link to the blog post and the text to Mr. Twietmeyer would say, if he’d even respond. here is what he said (it looks supiciously like a form letter response):
MYTH about Mars Phoenix Lander stereoscopic imager only being capable of black and white images
There is a myth circulating around the web that the stereoscopic imager on the Phoenix Lander is only a monochrome (black and white) camera. Since monochrome CCD cameras have a superior resolution to color CCD cameras, it is claimed or implied by some this is why NASA did not display color images the night the Phoenix Lander sent the first images to Earth. This is a defective argument, since it denies that the camera can take color images although this requires the use of three movable filters at 600, 530 and 480nm.
Color images posted the day after the landing are available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/images.php and the University of Arizona website. Apparently â??the futureâ?? NASA referred to, was to be the very next day.
Obviously, color images carry far more content and data than monochrome images. It is possible that NASA didnâ??t want to wait for color images, but one would still have expected that such a momentous first polar landing event would have been in color.
NASA was forced to be somewhat blind for precision near-Mars landing site selection. A camera designed and programmed by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) was designed just for this function â?? to send back images below the spacecraft during the landing phase of the mission. However, a software crash problem with the cameraâ??s rapid imaging software could not be resolved in time for the mission. The camera was actually mounted on the spacecraft during final assembly, but it was never activated according to NASA. It is essentially a dead camera.
In my previous report on the landing at http://www.rense.com/general82/phoe.htm I made the following statement:
â??The color images from Mars are obtained from a solid state camera, very similar to a typical camcorder or cell phone which almost everyone owns today (but much higher resolution.) Color information is already present in Mars images, but clearly this was deleted for reasons not explained.â??
I did not say it was the SAME CCD as a camcorder or cell phone, but SIMILAR. I did not state the camera had a color CCD chip. But I did state it has a much higher resolution than a camcorder or cellphone.
My statement â??color information is already present in Mars imagesâ?? should be clarified. I was referring to the fact that the planet has many colors other than red (which is almost all we ever hear about from NASA) and that the stereoscopic imager has the capability to take color images. In fact, the stereoscopic imager camera has a total of 12 filters covering the visible and invisible spectrum.
A comment about the camera resolution is found at http://www.gizmag.com/touchdown-phoenix-spacecraft-lands-on-mars/9375/ :
â??The Robotic Arm Camera is able to take full-color pictures of the area and the samples, and has a resolution of 23 microns per pixel at the closest focus, far greater than the cameras on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.â??
When NASA interviewer Gay Yee Hill asked the NASA project manager the night of the landing if we would be seeing color images, his answer after a long pause was, â??in the future we would.â?? This is exactly what I reported previously at http://www.rense.com/general82/phoe.htm
Having researched more than 200 artifacts of both natural and artificial origin in rover images for my book â??What NASA Isnâ??t Telling You About Mars,â?? it became clear that NASA does not want to find these and neither does it ever discuss them.
Now NASA has recently stated that the temperatures have dropped to more than -100 at night. Iâ??ll be researching to find out why the Phoenix solar panels are not damaged by this temperature – and how these panels can still charge the batteries even though this is far below the temperature of known solar panels to function. It doesnâ??t warm up on Mars until the Martian afternoon at the pole. Perhaps they are heated from underneath using Polonium.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I forwarded the link to the blog post and the text to Mr. Twietmeyer to see what he would say, if he’d even respond. He did, and I tried to post it here, but I keep getting a database error about character set collations. Would it be out of line for me to post it on my own blog and then post a link here, or should I forward the email to Mr. Plait and let him tear apart Mr. Twietmeyer’s reply? Which would be best?
May 30th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Damn! And now it shows up *after* I make that last comment! Please accept my humble apologies, everybody, I did not intend to spam!
May 30th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Did you see the rest of their web page articles. Lots of Jewish conspiracy and scarry holocaust denier stuff.
Yikes
May 30th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
You know, a very recent post was great. You were telling us brain-dead bumblers what to think about a non-science issue like the middle east and advertising and stuff. But today you’re back on this science crap and it’s just dull. You should stick to what you are good at, those wonderfully colorfull rants about other people and how they are stupid and evil for disagreeing with you.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Something hinted at in the Twit’s post and possibly a future lesson from you is about data pipelines…
“One of the JPL engineers declared and I quote here verbatim, “They have images at the science operations center in Tucson, but we don’t have them yet.” Right after he said that, the live audio feed for the on-screen video was muted to an almost inaudible level until the images appeared on a wall television display at JPL. On this great historic moment, WHY was there such a delay in JPL displaying these images? It should have been essentially instantaneous.”
May 31st, 2008 at 1:41 am
[...] ??? ????? ????? ???? ?? ????? ??? ???? ???? ?? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? (??????:??? ???: ??? ?? ???? ???? ????)? ?? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??. [...]
May 31st, 2008 at 3:16 am
@Nicole:
That’s the difference between being a TA and a faculty member: as the latter you can talk about whatever you want . . .
Seriously, I’ve noticed that most of the recent texts don’t give much space to the topic, so I added some more to it in class. Since eventually no matter what kind of detector we use to get an image or whether it is an image in visible light or some other part of the spectrum, we perceive it through our eyes, I spend a few minutes talking about how the eye works and its limitations as a detector, and how we have three different types of cone cells to see three primary colors (and note that peak sensitivity of the rod cells for monochrome vision in low light situations is at a somewhat shorter wavelength than the peak for color vision in bright light) and since a similar device sold in educational equipment catalogs went for iirc $160 or so several years ago I use some of the toys which use red, blue, and green LEDs in various combinations to illustrate how other colors as well as white light is made up of combinations of those three primary colors, and also briefly touch on how color-blindness occurs when one or more of the three types fails to develop correctly, with reference to John Dalton’s discovery of his own color-blindness and showing a few of the color-blindness test dot pictures on the screen (so far I haven’t had any students who reported not being able to see the correct numbers). I do talk about how other animals can see fainter objects (the common house cat can see things 6 times fainter than the average human, which may explain why my cat insists on going out at this time of the night, while an owl can see things 100× fainter than a human, and I have made up transparencies showing Orion as it could be seen if our eyes were as sensitive as a cat or owl) and more or fewer colors (some birds can see five primary colors — the mantis shrimp info is too new for me to have used — while contrary to popular belief dogs do not see only shades of grey but are dichromats like Dalton and most other “color-blind” humans while cats appear to be trichromats like humans but have a lower cone density so they probably see the same colors we do but all the colors are washed out rather than as vivid as we see them).
(more . . . )
May 31st, 2008 at 3:36 am
(continued)
When I talk about the different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum I mention how the different regions were initially discovered, including Ritter’s discovery that radiation past the violet end of the visible spectrum caused silver chloride to darken even faster than any color of visible light, and later when I am talking about detectors I point out that that reaction is the basis of B&W photography, and then as someone here has already mentioned color film is basically three layers of light-sensitive chemicals separated by filters which produces three images which can be combined to retrieve the color information in the original scene. Then I go on to talk about how CCDs work in general (a chip divided into an array of pixels and when light hits the surface each pixel essentially counts the number of photons which hit it and so a computer can read the numbers and reconstruct the image from the light levels), then go on to point out that the CCD makes a monochrome image and in order to make color images we take a series of monochrome images through different filters and combine the results: if we use red, blue, and green filters which match the color sensitivity of the three different types of cones in the eye, we get a natural color image, or if we use different filters we get a false-color image. One good comparison to illustrate the latter is to compare the famous “Pillars of Creation” image to a true-color image of the central regions of M16 which are mostly pink due to the Balmer-alpha emission of hydrogen. (By this time they have already seen the light given off by hydrogen and helium and a few other discharge tubes, both with just their eyes and through a spectroscope, and we have covered the Bohr atom and its explanation of the formation of spectral lines.)
Anyway, by the time I’ve covered this material I hope they have a better idea of how images are formed and how we perceive them and so can better interpret what they will be seeing when they see astronomical images as we go through the semester or in the news.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:56 am
I suggest everyone take a few minutes to look at http://www.rense.com to see what other kinds of unbelievable crap appear there. Zionist police state propaganda, hair loss cures, get rich quick schemes. No one with half a brain can take anything that appears there seriously, but unfortunately there are plenty of demibrains out there who eat this stuff for breakfast!
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Phil, what is with this blog that eats apostrophes?
Scott Schrantz said:
> I do wonder, though, why they wouldn’t throw something equivalent to a consumer digital camera into the mix too, for the sole purpose of capturing images to be used in press releases. If we can get a $200 camera at Wal-Mart that takes decent images on Earth, you’d think NASA could find some way to include that type of technology on the landers and rovers for not too much more. And that way they could release color images to the press without the need to be “processed”, while still being fully capable of taking real photos for the mission.
Besides the points that Christian Treczoks makes, consider this.
1) They are already flying the best resolution camera they can afford for the mission. Why should they fly a second camera that has lower performance and isn’t scientifically useful?
2) Every item on a lander like this is a trade off against something else that could fly (weight, space, cost, power). Want to fly a $200 Wal-mart camera to take tourist photos in addition to the special science camera? Okay, but that means we can’t fly the chemistry experiment searching for methane. Or whatever.
3) Regardless of what kind of camera and how the chip works, that image in data form must be transmitted back to Earth. This may involve relaying off an orbiter or a direct transmission to the Deep Space Network, but in any case, data has to be sent from Mars to Earth. We’re not talking about fiberoptic broadband here. The data will have to be “processed” by NASA – received, relayed, turned from bits into pixels, etc. (I see John Phillips, FCD mentioned this.)
From Twietmeyer’s email:
> This is a defective argument, since it denies that the camera can take color images although this requires the use of three movable filters at 600, 530 and 480nm.
> Obviously, color images carry far more content and data than monochrome images. It is possible that NASA didn’t want to wait for color images, but one would still have expected that such a momentous first polar landing event would have been in color.
Let me get this straight, he is aware that the color images would take more time to get, but then still thinks NASA should have taken the first images in color? It’s called “immediate proof that the lander made it and is working”. Color can wait, let’s see that we can see something.
Bah, it’s “If I ran the zoo.”
And let me quote again from his web post:
“Color information was deleted”. Sorry, that is just incorrect. He claims to be aware that the color information comes from taking multiple images through different filters, but then says information was deleted. The information had to be assembled before you could see it!!!
Next he states:
> My statement “color information is already present in Mars images” should be clarified. I was referring to the fact that the planet has many colors other than red (which is almost all we ever hear about from NASA) and that the stereoscopic imager has the capability to take color images. In fact, the stereoscopic imager camera has a total of 12 filters covering the visible and invisible spectrum.
Bull-ony. He clearly states that color information was deleted. If the camera requires multiple exposures through different filters to capture the color content, then that is not deleting the color information.
> “The Robotic Arm Camera is able to take full-color pictures of the area and the samples, and has a resolution of 23 microns per pixel at the closest focus, far greater than the cameras on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.”
Interesting detail about the Robotic Arm Camera. It does not use filters to take color images. Rather, it uses colored LED’s to illuminate the image and takes multiple images with different lighting. Thus color images can be obtained if the lghting conditions are right so the LED’s give good contrast, but cannot be obtained if the surface brightness is such to overwhelm the LED’s output.
> When NASA interviewer Gay Yee Hill asked the NASA project manager the night of the landing if we would be seeing color images, his answer after a long pause was, “in the future we would.” This is exactly what I reported previously at…
The full quote from the rense post:
This claims there is some sinister plot to distort the Mars environment. This is false. The delay was because the spokesman at the press conference was not given an explicit time on when they would complete the image processing, which was probably dependent upon varying factors like someone working late, so without taking time to contact the team to be given a detailed schedule, he just answered the unspecific “in the future”.
Twietmeyer’s excuses are transparent.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:42 pm
[...] The real Phoenix, in black and white This post focuses on antiscience, but it's also really cool to learn about how we get images of Mars. [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 2:12 am
It seems to me that after color processing, any image we look at in color showing the American flag (the one on the craft itself), should look like the colors on the flag.
I think the flag on the lander looks a bit funny in the pictures.
I’m sure there’s a good explanation for this.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
[...] The fraud conspiracists have too much time on their hands and have now discovered Phoenix. Phil over at Bad Astronomy has to waste his time debunking them, so he takes them out to the woodshed for a good lashing in The Real Phoenix in Black & White. [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Tim wrote:
“Another reason to take filtered greyscale photos is that the Bayer filter (RGRGRG… on one row, GBGBGB… on the next, and so on)
1) reduces the effective resolution of the resulting image
2) restricts the camera to ONLY red/green/blue filtering, and
3) results in some spatial chromatic aliasing that muddies the image down.”
Actually Bayer (or RGBE) filtering doesn’t reduce the effective resolution of the image. The two missing color values of each pixel are interpolated using some demosaicing algorithm, briefly described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
Your other points are valid though. It’d be insane to send cameras with fixed bayer filters to Mars.
If the NASA would provide live color images from Mars, THEN the conspiracy theorists might have genuine case
August 7th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Oh, yeah.
Good ole’ Phil – over at Bad Gastronomy. He truly is the defense lawyer of the sect that is determined to remain the superior entity in all of the known universe. Such a valiant effort. But, why – for all of these years now… does he do it??
I mean… for years now – making enormous efforts to ensure that you weak-minded individuals are not persuaded by ‘ridiculous claims’ of anything other-worldly. What an intellectual and moral ‘guardian’ we have on our side!! Thanks to him… we are not walking around – believing that we are anything other than the true & unique ‘Gods’ that we truely are.
Thanks to Phil…. we are all now quite reassured that God only created us – here on this singular one-and-only Garden of Eden we call earth. Oh… that’s right. I over-looked the fact that Phil also thinks you are a moron for believing anything as delusional as ‘God.’
So, why does he do it?? Well… I once saw him making an appearance at a Sci-Fi convention in Los Angeles. There… we was selling his personally autographed books. I forget the title… but it was something on the lines of ‘You are an idiot to believe that there is anything other you.’
So, why have any faith… or hold onto any moral reserve to keep you apart from your destiny of total consumption and disregard for preservation.
Believe only what your intellectual deity tells you. When you need to have your own opinion… well, he won’t give it to you – but you can purchase it for a mere 24.95 ( plus shipping and handling. )
Phil needs the money – so that when he breaks his arm… patting himself on the back – he can afford the medical bills.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
“I’m not sure if this is nitpicking or confusion, but in what sense is grayscale not monochrome? Monochrome means “one color”, not “one brightness”.”
Think about it for one second… Since when has black AND white been “one colour”?
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:27 am
funny, the 2 things that made me LOL in that article, was that those images are monochrome(wrong!) and (Copy pasted for accuaracy’s sake)
“Technically, there is NO reason for these live images to not be in color except for one major reason – people will realize that Mars isn’t red after all, but it has a blue sky almost identical to that of Earth”
I am now converted, oh wise conspiracy hoax believer dude. Mars has a blue sky.
PS: it’s spelled monoCHROME not monoCROME. If you want to convince people that you know what you’re talking about, learn to use spellcheck.
Phil: Love your blog!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PS: I was totally sarcastic about being converted(just in case you couldn’t tell)
October 14th, 2009 at 2:26 am
There are cosmic ray hits, calibration issues. If it is calibration issues, I think they should check on the Temperature Calibrator maybe it is defective.
People might think this is not true because the issue is not yet clear to other people.