Data archaeology
Mar. 14th, 2008 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinTed Stryk talks about his work extracting new details of the night sides of Uranus's moons from old Voyager data.
This kind of thing fascinates me--the idea that there could be details lurking in old data that can be extracted now because anyone with a personal computer has access to power beyond what JPL scientists had in the 1980s (and because things that were the province of space-probe teams, if that, are now features of Photoshop). It very much reminds me of this 2004 work I've linked to before in which people heavily processed 1980 Voyager 1 pictures of Titan (cross-checking with some low-resolution pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope) to find that it actually did manage to pick out some surface details--there are fuzzy but recognizable outlines of the bright and dark regions now known as Xanadu, Shangri-La and Adiri.
This kind of thing fascinates me--the idea that there could be details lurking in old data that can be extracted now because anyone with a personal computer has access to power beyond what JPL scientists had in the 1980s (and because things that were the province of space-probe teams, if that, are now features of Photoshop). It very much reminds me of this 2004 work I've linked to before in which people heavily processed 1980 Voyager 1 pictures of Titan (cross-checking with some low-resolution pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope) to find that it actually did manage to pick out some surface details--there are fuzzy but recognizable outlines of the bright and dark regions now known as Xanadu, Shangri-La and Adiri.