
An un-edited view of Saturn - joan_kode
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2019/05/20/an-un-edited-view-of-saturn/
======
dmix
> Instead they are compressed with Kris Becker’s implementation of Huffman
> encoding. Thankfully the source to the compression, and various manipulation
> tools are included in both C & Fortran.

As someone who often helps a spouse decode various police car/bodycams and
random retail surveillance formats for court work, that always comes on DVDs,
this makes me so jealous.

Imagine... having the source code to decode the image or video format right on
the CD. In a portable C format.

And not having to install Windows XP to support whatever proprietary DRM'ed
software that no longer has a support page on the internet, after 2hrs trying
to get it working in a Windows 10 VM? Then leaving the whole OS VM installed
on your laptop because you couldn't be bothered to do it twice...

I wish the local police hired NASA people to set up their systems.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Oh VICAR is not so strange. There was this "weird" habit back then that the
file formats (IMG astronomical format does this too) would start with an
ASCII-based fixed length header (or the header is variable size, but has a
line of text at the start that states the size). Always a multiple of 512 or
1024 bytes too. And then in the header you can literally read (with your human
eyes) the format used, how many bits per pixel, the lines width and how many
lines and so own.

You can literally write a parser from reading a couple of headers. Of course,
it's much better to be provided with software that can handle all the
nuisances of the format without having to test it when something fails on you.

~~~
saagarjha
Sounds a bit like NetPBM.

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perl4ever
I find the idea of "the planets as they would appear if you were really there"
very appealing and have thought about it for years. But "un-edited raw
imagery" is just the beginning - surely you can't rely on the unadjusted data
having the frequency response of the human eye any more than the heavily
massaged pictures one usually sees. It seems like a major project that would
take significant expertise to try to reproduce what the human eye would see up
close.

~~~
friendlybus
I really like the idea of raw unedited data. The closer we get to captured
scientific data the better the feeling of exploring the planet in real life is
for me. The whole artistic spirit of realism leaves me a bit flat because it
ends up being like Jurassic park dinosaurs - the missing parts filled in with
frog DNA and jacked up for theme park amusement. Colours blown out, infinite
camera perspectives, musical stings and character plot or gamified systems of
interaction.

Exploring raw data is closer to participating in electronic discovery than
exploring an artists attempt at making a huge empty planet palatable to the
spending consumer.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Depends on what you mean with "raw data", the pictures shown in the post are
clearly calibrated data: you can tell because there isn't a lot of noise and
other camera artefacts.

Here is an nice example showing how WISE (W3) images go from _real_ raw data
to science calibrated images:
[http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/fig...](http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/figures/sec4_4af3.jpg)
(taken from
[http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec...](http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec4_4a.html))

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mhb
For an even more primal experience, it's worth looking at Saturn with your own
eye through a telescope. An 8" reflector is fine. Even though it is obviously
nothing like these photos, it is surreal to see that object up in the sky.

~~~
ubermonkey
I had that experience at a charity stargazing night here in Houston not long
ago. It's really something!

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hammock
How discrete are the rings of Saturn? Do they look continuous due to the long
exposure time of a photograph? Would they look more like an asteroid belt if
we could increase the shutter speed?

~~~
kylek
Discrete enough to have names of their subdivisions-

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Subdivisions_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Subdivisions_and_structures_within_the_rings)

~~~
hammock
Those are gaps between rings. I'm asking about the rings themselves - would
they look more like dotted lines?

~~~
kylek
>> They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers
to meters

>> The densest parts of the Saturnian ring system are the A and B Rings,

I don't see anything that says exactly how dense the rings are, though...

~~~
nine_k
I think that when you're close enough to resolve a meter-sized (car-sized)
object, the ring would look like a straight band to you. From where you can
see the rings curved, you must see them as "solid".

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smcameron
Two days days ago this was on apod:
[https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html)

~~~
dylan604
I really miss having a working APOD official iOS app. The others just don't
appeal to me.

That video is gorgeous. "That' no moon!"

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foobarbecue
PDS Atlas is the best place to get this data: [https://pds-
imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/](https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/) and
USGS ISIS is the software to work with it: [https://github.com/USGS-
Astrogeology/ISIS3](https://github.com/USGS-Astrogeology/ISIS3)

~~~
SiempreViernes
This is where I end up if I start at the planetary data archive, these are the
raw images for Saturn: [https://pds-
imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/voyager.html](https://pds-
imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/voyager.html)

------
zxcvbn4038
The touching up of photos by NASA is really interesting - I don’t want to fuel
all of the mars conspiracies but undeniable that a lot of stuff in the mars
photos is obviously airbrushed and there has been a transition from everything
on mars being red hued to blue sky with lots of greys and browns in the
landscape, it shows that NASA has taken a lot of artistic license. The Viking
probes all had color calibration plates attached, so I’m pretty sure someone
made the decision to tint the photos because “the public expected the red
planet to be red”, then someone else made a different decision, so slowly the
red hue is being replaced with natural colors just to save face.

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gorgoiler
I don’t really know anything about astronomy, but I noticed a planet at dawn
and looked it up: Jupiter! Saturn and Mars are also super visible in the same
part of the sky about an hour before sunrise. Pluto is lined up too but
obviously not visible. Have a look!

SkyView was an app recommended to me, but it would be cool to have something a
little more scientific. What’s a nerdier app I can’t try?

~~~
mkl
You could try Stellarium: [https://stellarium.org/](https://stellarium.org/)

It has many features and takes quite a bit of exploring.

~~~
gorgoiler
Love it, thanks! Specifically:

[https://stellarium-web.org/](https://stellarium-web.org/)

Sky View is nice but it’s a bit noddy: I couldn’t get it to break down the
four big moons of Jupiter, which are so clearly visible, but I didn’t know
which was which!

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shawnz
> like all old CD-ROM’s they are not quite ‘ISO CD9660’ enough so they don’t
> mount on Windows 10, or OS X.

Not sure what the issue was here, I was able to mount the file just fine on my
Windows 10 machine

~~~
scruffyherder
Are you using daemon tools or something else 3rd party?

I couldn't get them to mount on Windows 10, I ended up using MS-DOS to mount
them. I've had this issue with a number of early 90's CD-ROM's that apparently
violate the spec, including Microsoft Bookshelf

[https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftBookshelf1991](https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftBookshelf1991)

~~~
shawnz
No, I just changed the extension to ISO and double clicked, using the native
ISO mounting functionality.

Can't test with MS bookshelf as there doesn't appear to be an ISO provided

EDIT: Nonetheless thank you for preparing these interesting images!

~~~
scruffyherder
Maybe it's been some update or something, it sure didn't work when I tried
this a year ago.

I ripped the CD of bookshelf as a MDF

[https://archive.org/download/MicrosoftBookshelf1991/msbooksh...](https://archive.org/download/MicrosoftBookshelf1991/msbookshelf91_mdf.zip)

Since it wasn't mounting for me either with the physical disc, or the image...
I passed the drive under Qemu and MS-DOS read it fine.

The whole thing was... Strange in that I can't get these old discs to mount.
Although they read fine. strange.

It was really fun taking these old CD-ROM's disc images, and actually
manipulating the data. I didn't expect to get anything and I was really
surprised that it worked.

