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Post by skinbath on Jul 26, 2005 14:54:08 GMT -4
With regard to the various sites that offer pictures of such things as the "shard" etc. Where do these photo`s originate and how valid are they? How valid are the interpretations and who interpreted them in order to make the claims that are made? What,if anything,does NASA say about these images. How true is it that the "eye in the sky" can tell which newspaper you are reading etc?I`ve got both Google Earth and World Wind and the images are pretty good and I can have this all for free.If I pay a small sum of money,via Google Earth,I can have images that are very good indeed,so,I imagine that the images available to the various authoritative bodies must be astounding in their magnification.If this is the case,why isn`t this sort of capability incorporated into modern space projects?(or is it?). ( edited to remove needless cynical remark )
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Jul 26, 2005 15:24:30 GMT -4
How true is it that the "eye in the sky" can tell which newspaper you are reading etc? Since the capability of our spy satellites is classified there is no way to know. However, I'm pretty sure claims of being able to read the headline of a newspaper are exaggerated. If this is the case,why isn`t this sort of capability incorporated into modern space projects?(or is it?). Somebody here may be more knowledgeable about this than I, but the obvious answer to me is mass. It is my understanding that spy satellites are very large and massive. Interplanetary probes and satellites usually have very tight mass limitations. Your typical mission just doesn't have the budget to send something the size of a spy satellite half way across the solar system.
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 26, 2005 15:50:00 GMT -4
If you're talking about the sites that claim that out-of-place objects such as artificial constructions, alien skulls, or other telltales can be seen in space photography, then the key concept here is pareidolia. That is a psychological phenomenon whereby minimal stimulus gives rise inappropriately to claims of identification or recognition of objects. It is the same phenomenon likely underlying UFO, cryptozoology, paranormality (i.e., ghosts and spirits) and many other beliefs that base their beliefs in large part upon partially inexplicable observations.
Informally it is often called "Rorshaching," since the principle is the same: subjects in the Rorschach test are asked to assign an identity to abstract forms. The presumption is that the identification cannot be directly visual and therefore derives in part from preconception. This is borne out in the fact that UFO enthusiasts intepreting the same ambiguous data tend to see UFOs while ghost hunters see ghosts.
It all boils down to thinking you see something, and then going on to assume that what you thought you saw there was really there.
A number of enthusiasts rely on image "enhancement" without fully realizing the nature of the various encodings, filters, and other image analysis factors that affect perception. Enlarging a digital image, for example, produces interpolated images. Various filters applied after that step will "undo" the interpolation and render an artificially straight line that is dismissed as impossible due to coincidence. However, the straight line was due to the original pixels falling into their expected straight lines.
The interpretations are largely useless because of the indefensible assumptions on which they are based.
The people who do pursue these fall into the expected pseudoscientific categories. Some are merely interested, some are passionately convinced, and others are doing it just for the money. This latter category is important. There are a lot of people out there hungry for "conspiratorial" material. Consequently there are people who are willing to cater to that need for money, and will happily say what people want to hear.
As for orbital surveillance, it is obviously difficult to get reliable information on its acuity. But based on what we can discover or infer about the technology (for example, a 2.4-meter primary optical element, because that's the biggest that will fit in the space shuttle cargo bay), it is unlikely that they can read your newspaper over your shoulder. I am told by people whom I trust that they have a limited ability to identify individuals. I believe that would equate to a 0.05 or 0.1 meter per pixel resolution.
There was an attempt to transfer KH-11 technology to astronomy -- i.e., the Hubble. But because the U.S. naturally wants to keep its surveillance capacity secret, the technology techniques are not generally available, even to other projects. The Hubble engineers at Lockheed were not able to consult with their KH-11 colleagues, even though it was the same company.
An example of top-secret technology transfer was the SEC video tube in the Apollo 11 television camera. It was part of a low-light television system that was not otherwise available to engineers.
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 26, 2005 15:53:03 GMT -4
It takes our biggest boosters to put spy satellites into low Earth orbit. We don't yet have a launch system capable of delivering such technology to lunar orbit. Spy satellites are necessarily large because their resolution is tied by hard and fast physical principles to the size of the optical assemblies. They must be large -- as wide as possible. And the various elements must be kept in perfect alignment through various thermomechanical stresses. That can only be accomplished by a robust structure.
Future designs will expand the primary optics by using arrays of them in concert. These designs may be scalable and packageable for lunar surface surveys from lunar orbit.
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Post by skinbath on Jul 27, 2005 7:19:43 GMT -4
Thanks,but let me see if I`ve got this right as far as the images are concerned. Simply put; the images were originally lunar images taken by NASA (yes I know,who else,Aliens?) which were then enhanced digitally.Then,because digital enlargement is not the same as,say,enlargement via a magnifying glass,then these very methods cause the anomalies?After enlarging they are viewed and the rule of pareidolia applies and from this,a whole industry of debunking has arisen. (I`m a little unfamiliar with some of the terminology /jargon used so please bear with me).
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jul 27, 2005 7:37:23 GMT -4
Thanks,but let me see if I`ve got this right as far as the images are concerned. Simply put; the images were originally lunar images taken by NASA (yes I know,who else,Aliens?) which were then enhanced digitally.Then,because digital enlargement is not the same as,say,enlargement via a magnifying glass,then these very methods cause the anomalies?After enlarging they are viewed and the rule of pareidolia applies and from this,a whole industry of debunking has arisen. (I`m a little unfamiliar with some of the terminology /jargon used so please bear with me). Pretty much spot on.Imagine that the picture you see is made up of lots of little rectangles of a single colour. By increasing the zoom, you just make each rectangle bigger rather then breaking down those rectangles. Because certain people then apply "enhancement" to these images, that distorts the image more, creating compression artifacts, where the software compresses that data and makes lines of the pixalised information. Add to that other ability to want to see things were they aren't...... Hey presto, cities on Mars
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 27, 2005 12:59:41 GMT -4
"Enhancement" is a word that image analysts generally don't use by itself, because it can mean so many things. "Enhancing for sharpness" or "Enhancing for contrast" are more typical usages because they refer to the processes involved and allow the knowledgeable reader to bring to mind the details of those processes and their side-effects. There are literally dozens of ways in which digital image tools can be misused (accidentally or intentionally) to create features that aren't there, or alter existing features to support a misleading interpretation. Many methods for digital image encoding and compression take shortcuts with the data. Those shortcuts aren't generally visible under normal circumstances, but are sometimes revealed when image manipulation is taken to an extreme. Noise in the images, quantization errors, and so forth have all been put forward as UFOs or alien cities on the moon or ghosts and angels. Enhancing for contrast, for example, can create the illusion of sharp lines where the original ines were not sharp at all. This has a tendence to create "outlines" for objects that do not exist. Enhancing for color saturation can sometimes inappropriately amplify the difference between colors and so create an "object" that didn't exist in the original. Another aspect we haven't discussed is falsifiability. If someone says he can see a 1967 Ford Mustang buried in the lunar dust, that's a falsifiable claim. That is, we can compare the alleged features against the well-known and beloved lines of the '67 'Stang and see how close the match is. If they don't match, then we can reject the claim. But if someone says there's an "alien spacecraft" in a lunar photograph, we have no basis to test the claim. We don't know what an "alien spacecraft" is suppose to look like, and so we'd have to concede that almost any shape is a candidate for an alien spacecraft. We'd have no basis for saying, "No, alien spaceships don't look like that." If we can't test the claim then we can't hold it as a viable conclusion. So the fact that many of these people are aiming at a target they define themselves (and therefore can't possibly miss) makes their claims suspect. But even when the alleged comparison is deterministic, there's always the notion of "close enough". We might agree that a certain features bears an uncanny resemblance to the grille of a 'Stang, but we have to keep in mind that this is how the human mind works. We're very good at matching patterns with a "close enough" strategy. Cubism wouldn't work otherwise: www.emeagwali.com/pablo-picasso/photos/pablo-ruiz-picasso-biography-painting-picture-guernica-cubism-self-portrait-art-biografia-9.jpg . The human mind looks at that painting and can see two people. But if you apply a dispassionate geometric analysis to them, they fail. We can "see" representations that bear only a passing objective similarity to their subjects. All of those alleged alien structures -- the ones that are supposedly so "regular" and "artificial", or which look "suspiciously" like something -- correlate only within some epsilon (some acceptable tolerance). They aren't exact matches; they're only "close enough". Well, the subjective impression of "close enough" isn't enough to make a match.
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Post by skinbath on Jul 27, 2005 22:42:26 GMT -4
\\ : Re; ://www.emeagwali.com/pablo-picasso/photos/pablo-ruiz-picasso-biography-painting-picture-guernica-cubism-self-portrai t-art-biografia-9.jpg \\: I can`t seem to get through to this link but I think I get the picture ( no pun intended! ). \\ : Re Alien structural images etc; They aren't exact matches; they're only "close enough". Well, the subjective impression of "close enough" isn't enough to make a match. \\: I agree you`d be hard pressed to make any sort of positive identification from any of the blurred and fuzzy images that are laughably passed off as proof ! It`s always the same.I`d always assumed that there was some sort of honesty and valid thought process behind the various theories on offer but the more I look into it and find out,the more deceit and buffoonery I see and,unlike the various images on offer,it`s as clear as day.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Jul 27, 2005 23:03:37 GMT -4
\\ : Re; ://www.emeagwali.com/pablo-picasso/photos/pablo-ruiz-picasso-biography-painting-picture-guernica-cubism-self-portrai t-art-biografia-9.jpg \\: I can`t seem to get through to this link but I think I get the picture ( no pun intended! ). Remove the space between the i and t in portrait and it should work.
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Post by skinbath on Jul 27, 2005 23:37:27 GMT -4
That did the trick,Thanks Bob.
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Jul 28, 2005 3:16:46 GMT -4
That is, we can compare the alleged features against the well-known and beloved lines of the '67 'Stang and see how close the match is.
Speaking of that, I wish Ford was brave enough to use those same lines on the new line of Mustangs, especially the Shelby, instead of trying to overly update and modernize the look.
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Post by Count Zero on Aug 4, 2005 15:29:33 GMT -4
Thanks,but let me see if I`ve got this right as far as the images are concerned. Simply put; the images were originally lunar images taken by NASA (yes I know,who else,Aliens?) which were then enhanced digitally.Then,because digital enlargement is not the same as,say,enlargement via a magnifying glass,then these very methods cause the anomalies?After enlarging they are viewed and the rule of pareidolia applies and from this,a whole industry of debunking has arisen. Oh, the lunar woo-woo industry goes back long before the photos were digitized. Back in the '70s & early '80s, when the main *ahem* "theory" was aliens on the moon, the "proof" was in n-th generation photocopies of Apollo orbital images. After so many reproductions, the contrast was 100% - all you had was black and white blobs, so that it was tough to make out so much as a crater; but boy you could sure see them space-aliens with their buildings & bunkers and excavation machinery... Another favorite tactic of the time was photographic enlargement of minuscule objects, to the point where the film grain was large blobs. Mind you, the source was not the original, but rather a reproduction, so you had at least two or more generations of grain. This was particularly useful when observing alien spacecraft in flight, such as the "Mysterious Object" in the middle of this star field photographed by Apollo 16: Of course, not only is that not an alien spaceship, it's not even a star field. These are particles coming off the S-IVB during transposition & docking. <next slide, please> The particles, their motion and their source is obvious in the 16mm film of the maneuver, but the author ignored that. After all, he had a book to sell. He did use an excerpt from the transcript of the astronauts describing the particles, but in the wrong context (I don't have the exact quote, so I'll paraphrase from the memory of something I read 22 years ago): "In actual transcripts from Apollo 16 which landed on the moon, the astronauts reported seeing several UFOs: "After we moved out a bit, we turned back towards the LM and saw a number of white objects flying out from somewhere behind it. I don't know what they were..."" The implication being that they saw this while they were walking on the lunar surface. This is how I learned the term "charlatanism".
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Post by gwiz on Aug 5, 2005 3:04:50 GMT -4
How true is it that the "eye in the sky" can tell which newspaper you are reading etc?I`ve got both Google Earth and World Wind and the images are pretty good and I can have this all for free.If I pay a small sum of money,via Google Earth,I can have images that are very good indeed,so,I imagine that the images available to the various authoritative bodies must be astounding in their magnification.If this is the case,why isn`t this sort of capability incorporated into modern space projects?(or is it?). I think I read somewhere that unless the spy satellites have got adaptive optics, a fairly recent technology, the best resolution the atmospheric distortion leaves you is about 15 cm, regardless of the size of the mirror on the satellite, so no headlines. The best commercially available space images are about 50 cm resolution. Google Earth includes images taken from aircraft as well as satellites.
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Post by sts60 on Aug 5, 2005 10:09:20 GMT -4
The ultimate resolution of gov't imaging satellites is classified - and I've never heard it anyway, so I'm not being elusive. But ain't nobody reading newspapers from orbit.
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Post by skinbath on Aug 5, 2005 11:11:36 GMT -4
The above replies,Re imagery,make sense.I`d often heard these claims and wondered why,if it were the case,the sattelite observations were not used to resolve questions such as WMD,as I`d seen images which intimated that WMD sites had been found but analysts couldn`t quite make out what was actually there,(lack of detail).Later,on the ground searches proved the assumptions to be wrong.
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