NASA Launches Massive Digital Library For Space Video, Photos and Audio (space.com) 48
earlytime quotes a report from Space.com: NASA on Tuesday (March 28) unveiled a new online library that assembles the agency's amazing space photos, videos and audio files into a single searchable library. The NASA Image and Video Library, as the agency calls it, can be found at http://images.nasa.gov/ and consolidates space imagery from 60 different collections into one location. The new database allows users to embed NASA imagery in websites, includes image metadata like date, description and keywords, and offers multiple resolution sizes, NASA officials said. According to the NASA statement, other features include: Automatic scaling to suite the interface for mobile phones and tablets; EXIF/camera data that includes exposure, lens used and other information (when available from the original image); Easy public access to high resolution files; Downloadable caption files for all videos. The new NASA archive is not meant to be a complete archive of all of the space agency imagery. But it does aim to showcase what the space agency has to offer.
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Re: Again? (Score:1)
Use of this material? (Score:2)
Anyone know off hand if these images/audio/video are free to use by the public, even commercially without fees or royalties?
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LOL neither do young people. Kid at work stared at me all smirky and asked why I cared about that, all he has to do is stream from Netflix if he wants to watch something.
I asked him if he knows what a "file" is.
We've come full circle. We're old, we're not cool, whatever we do is wrong.
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Reminds me of the punk in a planning meeting a few years back. Us old timers were talking about packet sizes and network congestion preventing our test results from getting to the servers in a timely manner. Young turk pops up and tells us "we don't send 'packets', we send 'files' to the analysis software." and looked at us like we had no idea what we were talking about.
He ain't here no more.
Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline (Score:2)
I hope nobody is going to sue them for not making the photos accessible for the blind so they have to take the whole thing offline again.
Nah, that would never happen [slashdot.org], right?
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Actually - this could be somewhat valuable to the massive projects running right now to archive government science data in case the current administration decides to purge any of it.
Software? (Score:1)
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This ^^^^^^^^^ /.ers want to know
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Perfect timing (Score:3)
The timing on this is perfect. A group I'm in is working on a book and right now going through trying to get copyright permission on all of the images we want to use (and sometimes you can't get it without paying fees, or can't get in touch with the author). Having such a huge wealth of public domain images all together on one seemingly well-designed search engine will be great for finding substitutions.
Too bad there's no ready substitution for figures from papers, however :P For a nonprofit book a lot of the big servers charge around $50 per image. Which for a full length book (dozens of figures) is thousands of dollars. Most authors are very nice about granting permission, but the journals are all about cash.
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The images and videoes are searchable by tags. They have really good descriptions that break into keywords well. Lots of images of hardware, astrophotographs, locations, mission patches, buildings and people.
This is a huge resource of labeled images for supervised machine learning. A massive gift to anyone wanting to do image processing.
I think (Score:2)
this site just broke the record for "fastest I've ever bookmarked anything".
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Thankfully the URL is easy to remember... just like images.google.com.
It's kind of amusing searching for keywords that you wouldn't expect to show up on a NASA image search. For example, I found a Native-American juggling hoops [nasa.gov], old ladies line dancing at a farmers' market [nasa.gov], kids dressed as Men in Black dancing underneath the Shuttle Endeavour [nasa.gov], people using the primary mirror of James Webb to take selfies [nasa.gov], actress Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) singing [nasa.gov], NASA's hip-hop dance team Forces In Motion [nasa.gov] (travels around m
NASA (Score:1)
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Because the name of it isn't "Lunar Lander", it's called the LM [nasa.gov].
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LM doesn't mean Lunar Lander, it means Lunar Module. I don't know why you expect NASA's search engine to find things when you call them by the wrong name. Do you expect it to turn up pictures of the space shuttle if you type in "Space Bus"?
As for your other stuff, you're clearly trolling, and I don't feed trolls.
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What are you talking about? We''ve been sending some damned impressive cameras out into space of late. Heck, even not just "of late". Have you seen the HiRISE images of Mars [uahirise.org]? Forget 4k, you can download those in 8k.
Now, if you're talking constant live 4K video footage, the problem isn't the cameras, it's the bandwidth over such huge distances.
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You said both the Moon and Mars. Can you not even read your own posts?
FYI, there are not "millions of people" who would like to sit around staring at a picture that only very slowly changes. And there's no point to live video anyway because there's no action; you can just broadcast stills and interpolate between them if that's what you want. All stills that NASA captures are released publicly for people like you to oggle at.
Lastly, in case you're actually curious, there are four missions active at the moo
Excellent timing, re: the Think Tank article (Score:1)
Remember the overhead article produced by a "non partisan think tank" that surprisingly recommended NASA outsourced everything? This is the kind of thing they'd included as "overhead" with their ridiculous criteria.
I don't know enough to evaluate the current NASA administration, but I think it does many good things in reaching out to the community and keep NASA relevant to the American public.
Advanced search? (Score:1)
Is there a hidden advanced search? It would be nice to find images larger than a certain resolution, especially with our high resolution screens and printers these days. It would be nice to have some other options as well.
Other than that, the site is terrific!