Honestly I thought I was going to see some visualisation of a 1px high image vs. various other long things. E.g. " At a pixel density of 330ppi this image would be longer than 1000 Starship Enterprises* ". Alas, no.
> What a 600,000 megapixels wide picture looks like (oddly-even.com) 23 points by lukedeering 1 hour ago | flag | 12 comments
Megapixel: I do not think it means what you think it means.
> A megapixel (MP or Mpx) is one million pixels [1]
600,000 * 1,000,000 = 600,000,000,000
> The largest photo ever taken of Tokyo is ... 600,000 pixels wide [2]
We have 600 * 10^9 pixels, at 330ppi resolution this would correspond to 1.828 * 10^9 inches, or 4.618 * 10^7m, i.e., about 46200km.
Now, there are different Starship Enterprises of somewhat varying lengths, but let's take NCC 1701-D, because that's the first one I found data on. Wikipedia puts its length at 642.5m [1]. Thus, it ould be about 71880 Starship enterprises for the given length (not accounting for any other dimensions of course).
More interesting, it's a bit more than the circumference of Earth (~40000km).
I'm really interested as to why you two consider a fictional space ship a good "underbelly feeling" measure of size. I like Star Trek, but I have absolutely no feeling for the size of the Enterprise. I'd believe it if you said it was 3km long, but also if you said that it was 400m long.
Not meant as a harsh criticism though, I like the math and the geekiness :)
I remembered it has around 700m, but didn't remember the exact figure. You could probably also ask either of us about the inner workings of transporter or the warp field dynamics ;). It's a geek thing.
You spend too much time with something, it feels natural to you ;).
Personally, I'd say I have a better feeling for "starship enterprises" or "battroids" [0] in terms of length or height than the ubiquitous "football fields" or "empire state buildings".
Both those fictional measures are things I've visualized being inside of or next to countless times. I can't say the same about the other two.
Emergency entrances for fire / rescue. You are not allowed to put anything in front of those windows, so that firefighers know they can break those windows to easily gain access to a building. They can then be used to help people escape, or get more firefighers into the building.
Pretty cool. Now imagine the tools the NSA has, live satellite feeds and hi-res cameras all over the US and the world with a bunch of Diet Coke drinking zombies clicking, zooming and panning all day long.
Working with satellite data I can tell you that the maximum resolution data you are likely to get from a satellite is 0.25m resolution (i.e. a pixel is the size of a car wheel).
And that's talking about likely military satellites - the public are lucky to get hold of 0.5m resolution.
Also, clouds get in the way. A lot.
For super high resolution imaginary like you are talking about, you need something like the ARGOS system [1].
This image was made by a slowly automatically rotating camera, but the ARGOS system seems to use a whole bunch of high resolution cameras, like a insects eye.
The interesting thing about the ARGOS demo on NPR was the automatic object tracking. The system can track cars, and people, as they move around. You could go back through the data to follow a guy back to his house after he is identified as planting a bomb. Or more HN, posting something from an internet cafe.
I really think that, as technology makes pervasive surveillance possible, we need laws to explicitly limit what the state or companies can do, at least domestically.
It supprises me that people are so much more upset about the NSA gathering data, given that they willingly gave it to ad networks that want to use it to make bad decisions. The highest cost google ads are for loans, insurance, and other services where the provider makes more money if the user makes an inappropriate choice. Imagine if google put a googleX ARGOS on it's Loon baloons, and found some way to monetize it. We really need laws in place to stop anyone doing that.
Atmospheric effects. Atmospheric refraction adds significant noise, fully obscuring features smaller than about 0.25 m.
Yes, ground telescopes have ways of cancelling out atmospheric effects, but the required calibration and long exposure is impossible with the orbit of spy satellites.
I don't think it takes long exposure. Ground-based telescopes can make the simplifying assumption that they are looking at static point sources. That makes it easier to correct for camera movement and for optical defects from the lense and the atmosphere.
On the other hand, looking down is a bit easier than looking up because the atmosphere will converge rays looking down, but diverge them looking up. See http://what-if.xkcd.com/32/.
That site also claims that others say Hubble is about as good as the best spy satellites, resolution-wise.
Hubble is of the best spy satellites. It was built by the same team that builds spy satellites, using all the same parts and equipment, tested in the same facilities, etc. It just has a slightly different secondary mirror setup and a very different set of instruments and control mechanisms, since it's meant to point at galaxies and do astronomy, not at the Earth doing surveillance.
Seriously, one of the hardest parts of the Hubble program was figuring out how to do it in the view of the public without revealing the underlying surveillance programme.
It's a permissions problem. Imagine the world as one big file system we're all sharing. You 'write' stuff to this file system all the time expecting nobody to come along and use it, but they do. If you limit access to some of this data by making it illegal that doesn't mean they don't still have access to it.
Seems like what we need is a quantumly encrypted coat we can put it on whenever we want complete privacy.
Which Firefox version are you using? The website loads fine for me (on OS X) in Firefox 24.0a2 (Aurora), but hangs Firefox 25.0a1 (Nightly). I filed a bug here: https://bugzil.la/901306
92 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadDoes anyone know any details about taking shots with such cameras? How much time do they actually need to capture photos with such quality?
Read the link. It's a stitched panorama taken with a robot camera controller.
Also funny:http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=60.1,...
Playing a table-top game:http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=66.3,...
Baseball:http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=89.1,...
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=60.3,...
There is another train on the track.
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=-127....
Here is a Ferrari (California I think) for anyone interested. The amount of details you can pick up is pretty amazing.
Or maybe he's just sneezing?
> What a 600,000 megapixels wide picture looks like (oddly-even.com) 23 points by lukedeering 1 hour ago | flag | 12 comments
Megapixel: I do not think it means what you think it means.
> A megapixel (MP or Mpx) is one million pixels [1]
600,000 * 1,000,000 = 600,000,000,000
> The largest photo ever taken of Tokyo is ... 600,000 pixels wide [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel#Megapixel
[2] http://www.oddly-even.com/2013/07/31/the-largest-photo-ever-...
*I wouldn't mind knowing how many Starship Enterprises a 600,000 megapixel wide picture would be if viewed at a pixel density of 330ppi.
Edit: The next gen enterprise was 642.5 Meters so a little over 70,000 of them.
PS: The NASA enterprise was a test platform and not space worthy.
Now, there are different Starship Enterprises of somewhat varying lengths, but let's take NCC 1701-D, because that's the first one I found data on. Wikipedia puts its length at 642.5m [1]. Thus, it ould be about 71880 Starship enterprises for the given length (not accounting for any other dimensions of course).
More interesting, it's a bit more than the circumference of Earth (~40000km).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_%28NCC-1701-D%2...
Not meant as a harsh criticism though, I like the math and the geekiness :)
You spend too much time with something, it feels natural to you ;).
It's missing the rear end, but it's about half of the ship's total length.
Personally, I'd say I have a better feeling for "starship enterprises" or "battroids" [0] in terms of length or height than the ubiquitous "football fields" or "empire state buildings".
Both those fictional measures are things I've visualized being inside of or next to countless times. I can't say the same about the other two.
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VF-1_Valkyrie#Battroid_mode
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=-296....
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There are actually lots of peoople in this one compared to other ones I've done....
what do they mean?
And that's talking about likely military satellites - the public are lucky to get hold of 0.5m resolution.
Also, clouds get in the way. A lot.
For super high resolution imaginary like you are talking about, you need something like the ARGOS system [1].
This image was made by a slowly automatically rotating camera, but the ARGOS system seems to use a whole bunch of high resolution cameras, like a insects eye.
The interesting thing about the ARGOS demo on NPR was the automatic object tracking. The system can track cars, and people, as they move around. You could go back through the data to follow a guy back to his house after he is identified as planting a bomb. Or more HN, posting something from an internet cafe.
I really think that, as technology makes pervasive surveillance possible, we need laws to explicitly limit what the state or companies can do, at least domestically.
It supprises me that people are so much more upset about the NSA gathering data, given that they willingly gave it to ad networks that want to use it to make bad decisions. The highest cost google ads are for loans, insurance, and other services where the provider makes more money if the user makes an inappropriate choice. Imagine if google put a googleX ARGOS on it's Loon baloons, and found some way to monetize it. We really need laws in place to stop anyone doing that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA <- skip to about 1:30
Yes, ground telescopes have ways of cancelling out atmospheric effects, but the required calibration and long exposure is impossible with the orbit of spy satellites.
On the other hand, looking down is a bit easier than looking up because the atmosphere will converge rays looking down, but diverge them looking up. See http://what-if.xkcd.com/32/.
That site also claims that others say Hubble is about as good as the best spy satellites, resolution-wise.
Hubble is of the best spy satellites. It was built by the same team that builds spy satellites, using all the same parts and equipment, tested in the same facilities, etc. It just has a slightly different secondary mirror setup and a very different set of instruments and control mechanisms, since it's meant to point at galaxies and do astronomy, not at the Earth doing surveillance.
Seriously, one of the hardest parts of the Hubble program was figuring out how to do it in the view of the public without revealing the underlying surveillance programme.
Seems like what we need is a quantumly encrypted coat we can put it on whenever we want complete privacy.
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=108.9... http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=108.9...
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=-.4,2...
DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T!