ISS Pile devant Saturne !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mais sans doute pas à ceux qui gèrent APOD !

C'est un faux, un montage......

Stephen W. Ramsden < www.facebook.com/stephenramsden > heeft 2 nieuwe
foto's < www.facebook.com/stephenramsden/posts/10156494655195088 >
toegevoegd.
4 uur < www.facebook.com/stephenramsden/posts/10156494655195088 >
· Atlanta,
GA, Verenigde Staten
< www.facebook.com/pages/Atlanta/107991659233606 >

Social Media Attention vs. The Wonder of Science
(the story of the faked APOD)

The world of amateur astronomy is an awesome place where people are
generally friendly and helpful. The images produced by today’s amateur
equipment far exceed the quality and resolution of professional NASA or
Observatory images of the 60s, 70s and 80s. It is absolutely amazing what
you can capture using readily available and inexpensive cameras, software
and telescopic equipment from your backyard or schoolyard if you devote
just a little time to learning the ropes.

Social media has also exploded with fantastic quality images and movies
from amateurs all over the world who no longer have to wait for the latest
issue of their favorite astronomy magazine to see what everyone else is
doing. It’s instantaneous satisfaction in a “Kardashian culture” of
consumerism. Along with the readily available exceptional images on social
media has come an extreme desire among some of our community to “get
noticed” or to have your image published in magazines or on important
websites.

APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) is a NASA ran website featuring the
best of the best images from professionals and amateurs alike chosen from
thousands of submissions weekly to highlight the absolute wonder and
fascination with the heavens. Getting your image featured as an APOD is the
“holy grail” for amateur astronomers and really tells everyone in the
community that you are “legit” and you have arrived on the scene.

Human nature has, of course, reared it’s ugly head in this hobby like any
other and recently an image and video featured as the APOD on Jan 22nd,
2016 has sparked a great deal of controversy among the people who know
these things as it seems to be clearly manipulated and faked, or at the
very least, processed far beyond what is acceptable in the community as a
real image.

The drive and decisions by the author are in question and one has to
wonder, have we gotten this self absorbed and forgotten what this hobby is
really about so much that we will now simply concoct some fantastic image
in order to get more exposure as a featured APOD.? Are the quality controls
so lax or has the hobby gotten so refined that even the people over at APOD
could be duped by such an obviously “photoshopped” image?

A little background; The International Space Station is an orbiting science
platform that makes a complete rotation around the Earth approximately
every 90 minutes. It is a large and very picturesque satellite that gives
ample opportunity for viewing and imaging from Earthbound telescopes,
cameras and eyeballs. The satellite routinely crosses in front of the Sun,
Moon, Planets and other celestial objects creating an opportunity to film a
beautiful movie showing the ISS and the object in the same image. These
events are called “transits” and are predicted with exact accuracy by a
fantastically functional website at Calsky.com
< l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FCals...ivvRGc6eOFYe53Dw&s=1 >
and in many astronomy software packages like Stellarium, etc.

Anyone on Earth can simply type in their location and get a complete list
of every time the ISS, or any other satellite, will cross their field of
view or transit an object in their sky.

Catching these “ISS transits” has been a very competitive endeavor, which
has addicted many an amateur astronomer. The frustration involved can be
overwhelming but the payback from successfully capturing these events is
enormous and has created an extreme desire to be the one who gets the best
transit image.

I myself gained a lot of popularity and cemented my position as an
astronomy lecturer mainly due to the organizer of NEAF at the time, Alan
Traino, noticing one of my ISS solar transits on Facebook in 2009. After
publishing that image freely on the internet, my popularity increased by
1000% overnight and the next thing I knew, people were requesting me to
come to their events to talk about my Solar Astronomy Outreach program -The
Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project- and actually asking ME to come
lecture on solar imaging. The power of capturing the ISS transit is clear
in the community.

One of the most popular imagers out there, Thierry LeGault (France) was
propelled to astronomy nerd stardom by his (almost) unbelievable DSLR
captures of the ISS/Space Shuttle transiting the Sun and Moon. I must
admit, I get very excited when Calsky.com
< l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FCals..._Rpq-x1xTUeIVEDQ&s=1 >
tells me that a Solar or Lunar transit is coming up in my area.

Now, back to the story. An image and video submitted to APOD by a young
astronomer in Germany recently caught the attention of the social media
machine. His post on his own Facebook page had over 150,000 views and
shares within a few hours and it was chosen by the APOD team as the
Astronomy Picture of the Day for Jan 22nd, 2016 after he submitted it to
them for review.

APOD listed in the description “On January 15, the well-timed capture from
a site near Dulmen, Germany required telescope… (sic) …with one frame
showing the station directly in front of the ringed gas giant.”

Almost immediately, seasoned planetary and ISS imagers in the community
started pointing out that there was surely something “not right” with this
image. I was attracted to a discussion on Facebook amongst two of the most
knowledgeable astronomers in my local community and decided to investigate
the image and the stated conditions under which it was taken.

This was indeed not a “well timed capture” but a composite of several
different videos at different times manipulated to show a transit at an
impossible level of detail.

It didn’t take long for me to notice first off that this video was
supposedly taken 2 minutes after sunrise in his community. This sparked my
interest as Saturn was on the Eastern side of the sky when this occurred
and I knew from years of experience that there is no way any piece of
equipment could get such a dark, noiseless background and such vibrant
colors and resolution of Saturn in broad daylight. So, I investigated
further.

From the authors own information it listed that The ISS was 24.1 arcseconds
in apparent size during the transit. He also said that Saturn was 27
arcseconds in diameter at the time. This is, of course, impossible, as
Saturn never gets larger than 21.37 arcseconds in apparent diameter. In
fact, at the time of this transit, Saturn was just 15.6 arcseconds in size.

So, what does this mean in English? The ISS was in reality almost twice as
big in the sky as Saturn at the time of this transit yet the image and
video showed it being smaller than Saturn. This was a sure sign of
something indeed being “not right” with this APOD.

The author also stated that he used a 42 frame per second exposure time
during a .02 second transit. Anyone who has ever imaged Saturn even in the
middle of the night in the darkest of skies knows that there is no way you
could possibly capture that amount of detail in a live view video with a 23
millisecond exposure time. Using this exposure time in a daylight sky would
yield nothing but noise and possibly a little bit of the ISS’s grainy
silhouette but definitely not a super black background and a perfectly
resolved color image of both the ISS and Saturn through a 10 inch Newtonian
telescope like the one the author says he used or any other telescope for
that matter. It simply isn’t possible.

While researching the event even more, it became apparent from many
discrepancies that this image was not a good old fashioned ISS transit
capture from a humble astronomer but a cobbled together composite video and
image manipulated and created by software to greatly enhance the details
and place the ISS artificially right in the middle of Saturn simply to
compete for another APOD award. When you go to the author’s website you
find that he also sells his prints of astronomical images so the APOD would
generate another couple hundred thousand hits and possibly a new batch of
sales for his images. Making a buck is not a crime but creating images that
aren’t real to make a buck is surely not something that I am in favor of.

Speaking of the author’s website, he is definitely an accomplished imager
and the vast majority of the images he has listed for sale and for show on
his site are quite beautiful and authentic. It made me wonder what could
possibly motivate someone with such talent to artificially create this
image….and then I remembered human nature and the quest for fame. This
coupled with the desire to make money was surely at the root of this fraud.

This entire episode brings into the limelight the not so productive process
by which these APODs are chosen. In order to be considered for placement as
an APOD, an imager must send an email to the authors containing the image.
This sounds simple enough but when you combine that with the overwhelming
desire amongst a fraction of our community to get published or to be
instantaneously transformed into a celebrity through astro-imaging, you get
the system we have now for APODs.

There are a great deal of astronomers, myself included, who simply are not
interested in being featured on these sites or in these magazines. The
payback in freely sharing our astronomical images is in the fact that other
people enjoy them and it spreads the wonder of science. Our society is
sorely in need of inspiration in space exploration and the sciences and the
best way to spark that is to simply share these beautiful images freely,
without copyright in an attempt to get some young mind interested in space.
Or even better, set up your equipment in public places or at schools and
let the non-astronomer get exposed to our wonderful hobby through hands on
participation. That’s what it is all about for me, your mileage may vary.

Unfortunately, the competitive aspect of our hobby has created a subculture
of “get published at any cost” and the APOD submission system feeds right
in to this desire. There is a great propensity among the people who have
prioritized getting noticed to submit these images through their email
procedure thereby flooding the entrants pool to overwhelmingly people who
have arguably lost the real importance and meaning of the hobby.

Perhaps if these authors actually searched the internet for their daily
image, like we do at solarastronomy.org
< l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsola...6zs8PXRvSY1RxaIg&s=1 >,
instead of relying on the email system to hand it to them, the propensity
for people to fake or overly enhance images would be less. I don’t know. I
do know that this entire episode has left a black eye on the hobby and
highlighted to what extent people will go in order to get attention even
when their actual untouched images are beautiful.


Manipulating an image through post processing in order to enhance the
existing details is one thing. Constructing an image or video from separate
and unrelated videos is something that we, as members of the community,
have to put a limit on unless we want to see nothing but fantastical Final
Cut Pro files instead of the much more impressive actual beauty of space.

Stephen W. Ramsden
Amateur Astronomer


Op 23 januari 2016 19:58 schreef Aerts Leo <Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.>:

> 't kan niet anders of het moet de Cassini sonde geweest zijn. Die kan er
> al eens achterdoor gaan !
> Niet te goedgelovig zijn is de boodschap.
> Leo Aerts
>
>

---

Original Message

---

> From: Vereniging voor Sterrenkunde (Belgian Association of Amateur
> Astronomers) [Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.] On Behalf Of Dodi
> Sent: zaterdag 23 januari 2016 16:46
> To: Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.
> Subject: Re: [VVS] ISS vóór Saturnus !!
>
> Zo fake als maar kan zijn dat beeld en die video. De maker zou er beter
> aan doen om zijn originele video te plaatsen - indien hij 'm heeft
>
> 2016-01-18 17:59 GMT+01:00 Raoul Lannoy <Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.>:
>
> > Een duitser heeft het gedaan: ISS vóór Saturnus !
> > www.astrovega.be/index.php/forum/espace/129-iss-pile-devant-sat
> > urne
> > Raoul Lannoy
> > Nerviërsstraat 19
> > 2018 Antwerpen
> > 0486.89.24.61
> > Lat N 51°12'22" Long E 04°25'16"
> >
> > ---
> > L'absence de virus dans ce courrier électronique a été vérifiée par le
> > logiciel antivirus Avast.
> > www.avast.com/antivirus
> >
>

A 40 mètres près au sol!!!





ISS devant Saturne