Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Crater Moved

mytrip writes "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location. 'In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe. The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north. The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the US imagery. Lakdawalla determined that the crater in question wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south.'"

spoiler alert

[gEvil (beta)]

SPOILER: It was a poor stitch/blend job.

Bad Astonomy

[jawtheshark]

Bad Astonomy [badastronomy.com] readers are already up to date. It's an error in composition of the picture [badastronomy.com]. Nothing less, nothing more.

TFA

[sporkme]

Lakdawalla found that a mistake was apparently made in stitching together the 19 strips of imagery to produce the finished picture - and that Chinese officials unknowingly pointed out that mistake as they defended the photo's veracity.

Not a fake, not an intentional edit, and a moronic blunder in trying to prove authenticity.

Misleading summary - it's not intentional

[iamacat]

As per the TFA, a mistake was made stitching together 19 separate photographs to produce image of a large area of the moon that the probe could not have captured in one shot. Since each picture is taken at slightly different angle and distance from the surface, some retouching is unavoidable. Otherwise some craters will look like a weird set of arcs with different radius rather than circles. Such stretching got to slightly move some depicted object from their exact position. In fact, it is not possible to produce a flat picture of a 3D object without distortions. Just compare the size and shape of Alaska on your globe as compared to your map.

I would assume that you can request the original mission data for serious research use instead of having to rely on newspaper clippings for science. If those images are also doctored, then we have a genuine controversy.

Doctored my ass

[cats2ndlife]

The original article says and suggests nothing about the photo being "doctored", it's simply a mistake that scientists make all the time. When can we expect a better moderated Slashdot or people who can read?

For crying out loud, include the rationale!

[DRJlaw]

The summary almost criminally neglects to include the reported reason for doing this, which is entirely legitimate:

Often, surface features that show up on two strips of data have to be manually corrected to produce the finished image, due to subtle changes in perspective.

"You know that there should have been seams in that image, and I just did not look for them carefully at the time," Lakdawalla told me today.

If you've ever viewed satellite imagery, you'll recognize that the source images are not nice, ultrahigh resolution wide arc views, but instead low resolution wide arc views or high resolution narrow arc views. The 'recognizable' product that is released to a nontechnical public, such as the images used in Google Earth, are the result of post-processing including image registration, tone correction, etc. See this article [incaindia.org] on mosaicing multi-sensor images, for example.

Surprise. Some technician made a mistake. No cookie.

People, RTFA, read the spoiler posts...PLEASE.

[Radon360]

I realize that it goes against the general Slashdot commenting procedure, but read just a little before commenting on this one, please.

1. Two photos were poorly stitched together, repeating an image of a crater on the combined photo (the crater was photographed twice).
2. Chinese scientists miss the poor stitch job and proclaim they found a new crater.
3. Someone else takes a close look at this "discovery" and points out the error in the stitch job.

The crater wasn't intentionally added, it's a result of trying to align two photos, each taken from a different perspective in which the edges won't completely line up exactly.

Supports not nullifies

[benhocking]

That supports the article; it doesn't nullify it. In fact, Bad Astronomy gave them credit for figuring it out. (The summary could have explained this a little better, but what's new?)

Re:spoiler alert

[gEvil (beta)]

The image as currently released by China is scientifically useless, since there are known errors within it. If a new image were to be released that was known to be done correctly, then it could potentially be scientifically useful.

Re:Bad Astonomy

[Kelson]

Except it doesn't appear to be a correct analysis. I can easily see the difference in the lighting and composition, but there still appears to be an extra/moved crater in the Chinese photo.

Two issues:

1. Is it copied?
2. What's up with the new crater?

The analysis concluded that it's not copied, and concluded that the moved crater can be explained [planetary.org] by a mistake stitching the components together. If you look at that article, you'll note that the new image is missing a small crater in one place, and has an extra small crater a little ways away, and there's an odd indentation around it. She figured out where the seam probably was, shifted the parts a bit, and they line up perfectly.

Re:maybe just a watermark

[HungWeiLo]

jiyuu-shikan.org is a well-known Japanese history revisionist website. No better than Holocaust deniers.

The best evidence they could come up with for the baby picture was "the photographer laughed" and "the guy carrying some baby walked towards the rail tracks".

Re:Who will pay the ultimate price?

[wattrlz]

Seppuku a.k.a. "Hari Kari" is a japanese tradition.

Re:Who will pay the ultimate price?

[sound+vision]

It's actually "Hara-Kiri".

Re:Bad summary

[Kelson]

Exactly how can you accidentally open up Photoshop and move a crater from one place to another?

By taking 2 -- or in this case 19 -- photos that cover different parts of an area, stitching them together to make one big photo, and making a mistake with the positioning on one of the pieces.

You did read the actual article before rebutting to a comment that told you the summary was inaccurate, right?

Re:Bad summary

[Tim C]

I'm not sure wtf is wrong with /. editors

Read the FAQ [slashdot.org] - the editors specifically deny any attempts at fact checking. Slashdot exists to post interesting stuff fast, not accurately.

Re:Who will pay the ultimate price?

[iRegister]

Sheesh, I tell the truth and I get moderated to -1. Couldn't the moderator consider that both are correct? Ask any student who's taken Linguistics 101 and he or she'll tell you that people actually don't use hyphens or spaces in Japan, and topics like what constitutes a "word," let alone where to add hyphens, is notoriously difficult to define. In the end, hyphenation and spacing is largely up to personal taste and neither correct nor incorrect.

Re:Bad summary

[OriginalArlen]

this story is baloney [planetary.org].

Re:Who will pay the ultimate price?

[davidsyes]

Hari Kiri.. Only uninformed or deceived Westerners refer to "Hari Kari"

http://home.no.net/harakiri/ [no.net]

-------------

http://www.parida.com/seppuku.html [parida.com]

---------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku [wikipedia.org]

"Vocabulary and Etymology

Seppuku is also known as hara-kiri (, "cutting the belly") and is written with the same kanji as seppuku but in reverse order with an okurigana. In Japanese, hara-kiri is a colloquialism, seppuku being the more formal term. Samurai (and modern adherents of bushido) would use seppuku, whereas ordinary Japanese (who in feudal times as well as today looked askance at the practice) would use hara-kiri. Hara-kiri is the more common term in English, where it is often mistakenly rendered "hari-kari.""

---------

http://www.answers.com/topic/seppuku-1 [answers.com]

---------

(Probably the blame can be squarely laid at the feet of hollywood and any servicepersons and tourists from the West who "just didn't get it" or who just didn't give a damn...)

But, it is carried out with a "tanto":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanto [wikipedia.org]

If you want to see it performed in a film (quite messy in real life and somewhat in the film), see:

Brother,

Starring and produced/directed by Kitano Takeshi (of "Beat"...) and starring Omar Epps

http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/2001/brother01.shtml [combustiblecelluloid.com]

http://www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/product.asp?sku=D27123 [moviesunlimited.com]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222851/ [imdb.com]

http://global.yesasia.com/en/artIdxDept.aspx/section-videos/code-j/aid-30742/ [yesasia.com]

and,

http://www.heroic-cinema.com/reviews/brother [heroic-cinema.com]

"this film sure is one violent sonofabitch. If you're not down for that, then maybe you should check to see if you can get into a session of Harry Potter instead. Some of the harshest violence in it is self-inflicted (that brother thing again, but taken to an illogical and hella messy degree). And all of it is LOUD. Handguns are like cannons. Kicks are like wrecking balls. Punches are like car crashes. Car crashes are like - well, like car crashes. I think the punches are louder."

----

Anyway, I will always respect Kitano-san for how he ended the film, something rarely permitted in many western films. You have to see it for yourself...

Re:maybe just a watermark

[DavidRawling]

I doubt it - the moon rotates on its axis precisely once per revolution of the earth, so the part of the moon facing the earth always changes. As a result, we can take see just over 50% of the moon's surface [ref: http://www.nineplanets.org/luna.html [nineplanets.org]] from Earth. Pictures of the far side must be taken by a lunar satellite.

Re:maybe just a watermark

[DavidRawling]

Oh for goodness sake. Previewed the darn thing twice and STILL missed it:

The part of the moon facing the earth NEVER changes.

Doofus!

(I'd have posted this sooner if I didn't have to wait a few hours between comments ...)

Re:Bad summary

[bheekling]

Indeed, it's frustrating how /. authors seem to like generating spin and controversy. Pure hits and revenue game.
If I didn't know /. was really just a blog, I would have said it's bad journalism at its best.

Photo that shows the Apollo 17 LEM on the moon

[xmark]

You can even see its shadow.
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/ls_17_5aa.html [swri.edu]

Better yet, go to the root page, and explore the sites of each of the lunar missions. You can "tunnel" down to photos only a few hundred meters wide.
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html [swri.edu]

Re:spoiler alert

[Rei]

They do, and they've announced intent to release it. This was just an image for public consumption -- and really, the standard for releasing images for public consumption is to blend the seams. For scientific images, you leave the seams unblended.

The only problem here was that one of their own scientists mistook a stitching error in their public product for an actual feature without consulting the raw data. That's all there is to this story. Everyone wants to turn it into another chance to bash China, though.