Amateur Astronomer Grabs Amazing ISS Picture 80
The Bad Astronomer writes "Ralf Vandebergh is an amateur astronomer, and using a simple telescope with a video camera attached to it, he took an incredibly detailed picture of the International Space Station. You can easily see the recently-installed truss and solar panels, as well as the Space Shuttle Discovery docked to the station."
If they want to save power (Score:1)
They should turn off those stadium lights
Re:If they want to save power (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a football field, 200 miles away, traveling at 17,500 mph.
You try it.
Re:If they want to save power (Score:5, Insightful)
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And you're complaining because you can't see their tits clearly.
Well, duh. Wouldn't you?
Re:If they want to save power (Score:5, Informative)
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most observatories are on top of mountains.
Not an easy thing to find in the Netherlands.
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I've seen a pair of really nice mountain in the Netherlands belonging to a girl named Hope.
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I thought it was blurry because he was hand tracking it (moving the telescope manually) -- a 25cm netwonian is a pretty decent sized scope though (just under 10")
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...grainy piece of crap?
Pretty strong opinion for somebody who knows nothing... :-)
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I'm still really surprised to find out how impressive this lousy looking fuzzy shot really is. On a clear night, with the right equipment, I would have assumed you could do much better.
Am I troll? Or just uninformed?
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You're just uninformed
You are simply spoiled by all the soooper hi-res photos of space thingys that are viewable on the webz. Unless you pay close attention to such stuff, it's easy to get the impression that photos of space thingys should always be razor-sharp and colorful. The fantastic images provided by Hubble haven't helped that situation. Unless you care, you probably haven't bothered to notice that even space-telescope pictures
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You *admit* you nothing about the topic, then proceed to shoot your mouth off with a strong opinion about it anyway. I never get that.
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WOW!! (Score:3, Funny)
Does it mean that the moon landing happened too?
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It would be cool to build a telescope dedicated to seeing the flag on the moon. However I'll just be happy with the mirror they put up there so we can shine a laser and measure how far the moon is away from the Earth.
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Bah. How do you know astronauts put the mirror up there? I'm sure that back in 1969, NASA could land something on the Moon which would reflect back a laser.
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Luckily for you, these are already in place:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_Experiment [wikipedia.org]
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/experiments/lrr/ [usra.edu]
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Par for the course... (Score:5, Informative)
He has a number of photos posted at Cloudy Nights [cloudynights.com] in the "Planetary and Solar System Observing" forum.
Also... (Score:1)
"embiggen". As in "click to embiggen". Nice, I'll use that...
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This time it was not a cromulent word to use.
A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:5, Informative)
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam [wildimaging.co.uk] and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
Re:A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:5, Informative)
Stacking frames does not require precision tracking. You only need to track it well enough to keep it in the frame. And in some cases partially out of the frame still has limited usefulness. The software correlates the positions based on what is in the picture. If there's enough of a pattern to make the alignment (at sub-pixel resolution), then it's easy. If it's fuzzy, you might have to do the alignment manually.
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since the angular speed and direction of the ISS an other orbital objects is constant and known, do you even need fancy alignment correlation?
If you have precise timing for your shots, would it suffice to align the first and last picture, and the alignment of the rest can be infered from them?
Re:A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:4, Informative)
You might be interested to have a look at some software called ALE [dyndns.org], which can be used to do this more or less automatically; you give it a sequence of frames and it'll synthesize a superresolution image combing data from every frame.
(You can also use it to generate panoramic images from video pans --- it automatically locates, rotates and transforms every frame correctly, figuring everything out for itself!)
The only problem with it is that it's really slow, so you'll probably want as big a computer as you can humanly manage.
One day I should try taking some simple digital camera footage of the moon and running it through ALE just to see what happens...
obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Thats no moon,it IS a space station give the man some geek points!
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Give geek points to the 3 year old, she deserves them!
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ha!
On a clear night... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:On a clear night... (Score:5, Funny)
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
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Another way to view (Score:5, Interesting)
You can view things up in orbit this way [astrosurf.com] too. Just don't do it without the proper filtering protection.
Can anyone else see the wires? (Score:1)
The blurring has almost hidden them, but put the image through a gaussian filter, and all is revealed.
Plus you can see the tiles missing from the space shuttle
Re:Can anyone else see the wires? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can anyone else see the wires? (Score:5, Funny)
Any sign of that bat?
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Re:Can anyone else see the wires? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
Even though its on the other side, facing away from us.
They can lift the print of the guy who screwed it on too.
But the real feat is that they can make out the license plate of the car across the street of a suspected terrorist by enhancing the reflection on one of the space stations windows, on a cloudy day.
I used to enjoy TV. Its almost sad. I can watch a rerun of something like "Columbo" and I find fewer plot holes and more credible police work, more credible set designs, more credible ... everything, than I do on CSI. Sure in Columbo the villain was usually improbably or even implausibly ratting himself out... but compared to the routine violation the current limits of technology, and in many cases the known limits of even theoretical sciencce we are subjected to in the CSI's... Columbo is actually the more beleivable... by far.
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If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
As 24 taught us, all you gotta do to enhance/scan/hack thru any computer problem is open another socket.
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If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
Quick! Someone send these guys a speeding ticket!
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I can see the wires too, holding it up. ISS is definitely a hoax, like the moon landings (which were actually filmed on a stage on Venus).
Also, a better title for this story might be "Hobbyist does something hobbyists do every single day, but we're short on news today here at Slashdot."
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What about Rayleigh Criteria? (Score:4, Informative)
A mirror -- just in case (Score:2, Informative)
Funny how nyud.net has disappeared from
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I hadn't noticed, but yeah, where is the love for nyud?
It's always the first thing I try to pull up a non-loading site; I've also used it as a form of cheap file mirroring.
No Subject (Score:5, Informative)
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image [nasa.gov] of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here [asahikawa-med.ac.jp].
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It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image [nasa.gov] of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here [asahikawa-med.ac.jp].
Holy shit. There's a picture of his on that site which actually managed to capture an astronaut on a spacewalk [asahikawa-med.ac.jp]. Talk about impressive.
Thanks for the link, there's a whole lot of very interesting shots there.
Vandeberghâ(TM)s 25 cm Newtonian Telescope (Score:1)
Re:Vandeberghâ(TM)s 25 cm Newtonian Telescope (Score:4, Informative)
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UFO hoaxers don't generally claim to find things that are in orbit.
I'd really like (Score:2)
Irresponsible (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe the government are allowing people to take these sorts of images. This is just a gift to the terrorists, they'll be able to see exactly which parts of the space station to target and may even be able to bring the whole thing down on a major population centre.
Unbelievable !
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I know you got modded funny, but you should have gotten some "insightful" points as well -- because this is how some military folks actually think.
An anecdote: Our office is in charge of creating a display for a local airport. The plan was to showcase some of the satellites we control and some information about what they do. A couple of weeks into working on things, someone from higher headquarters said they were concerned about including information on how high the satellites are above the Earth.
Yes --
Faked Picture (Score:4, Funny)
This is obviously a fake. If you look closely, you can see the wires holding up the space station! The only rational conclusion is that the space station was filmed in front of a live studio audience under strict NDA. Quick! Somebody notify Fox News! They'll do one of their award winning exposes. They'll probably even be able to get Geraldo to unmask the perpetrators!
Darn (Score:1, Offtopic)