image – A Darker View

Science Images are Ugly

One of the questions that comes up often enough is what do the pictures look like? And that question is followed by… Where can I see them.

A raw widefield 1.2um NIRC2 image of Jupiter taken 21July2006, credit Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley — A raw widefield 1.2μm NIRC2 image of Jupiter taken 21July2006, credit Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley

The problem… Science data is usually pretty ugly.

Keep in mind that the astronomers are often pushing the telescopes and instruments right to the limit. This means that the data is barely there, a trickle of photons that have come from unimaginably distant sources.

I have been in the observing room as the data comes in. I have watched over the telescope operator’s shoulder. It is strange to see folks so excited over a smudge.

Manipulating EXIF Tags for the Mavic Air

One of the fun things you can do with the panorama images created by the Mavic Air drone is to upload them to places these images can be seen a wide audience. Posting to Facebook is fun, but very few places will see more traffic than images posted to Google Maps.

I have posted a few dozen 360 photo spheres to Google Maps, most have been viewed tens of thousands of times, a few have view counts of a hundreds of thousands of times. Given that I often use Maps to explore areas I intend to visit, or may never visit and just want to see, it seems proper to also contribute to this online resource.

The newer DJI drones like the Mavic Air produce 360 panoramas automatically. Stitched on-the-fly onboard the drone the panoramas are saved to the memory card ready for use at the end of the flight. The images are not without issues, the onboard stitching is quick and small flaws are usually visible. Far better results can be achieved by other stitching software in post, but the drone produced panoramas are generally good enough for web posting.

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Maintaining the Archive

How do you organize your photos? The answer to that is critical. Anyone who generates a lot of images, and that is just about everyone these days needs to answer that question.

XKCD Photo Library Management — Photo Library Management from XKCD (Randall Munroe, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.)

Keeping my photo archive organized is a bit of a chore. But skip on the effort and it simply gets worse, to the point of being unusable. If you can not find the photos you need why take photos at all?

The trick is to develop a process and to use it… Religiously. I can not tell you how to do it, I can just tell you how I do it and offer a few suggestions.

There are two basic approaches, simply come up with a way to organize the images into a directory using nothing more than your operating system. The other approach is to use some form of photo organizing software to aid in the task. I do make a large assumption here, that the images are in digital format, not negatives and slides. For that you will have to look elsewhere for answers.

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Header Images

One of the fun features offered by the new theme is randomized header images. I have recycled a few of my back catalog of images to create a new look for the site. I am rather pleased with the effect. Sometimes this website/blog stuff is just fun.

In case you are wondering what they are, here is the cheat sheet, if you want it. I may add more images to the header over time.

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