Astronomy Photographer of the Year

[The Judge]

I don't know that I'd have picked the winner here, I greatly preferred some of the other images, but a great picture nonetheless. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14792580

 

[Vertigo]

There are some wonderful shots there TJ and I think I see what you mean from a purely aesthetic point of view. However I suspect that in this competion demonstration of technical skill count as much and the amazing detail captured in the Jupiter shot is technically quite extraordinary.

I must get myself a telescope...

 

[alchemist]

Spectacular stuff. Anyone have an idea how this was done?

 

[Mouse]

I looked at these, but the photos don't look like real photos to me. Looks like they've all been massively photoshopped and edited.

 

[The Judge]

I think you're certainly right about some of them -- in fact as I understood the commentary they acknowledged the winner had done just that, one of the reasons I would have marked it down.

 

[Metryq]

Post-processing is very common in astrophotography these days. Every planetary probe and space telescope is guilty. But if you want to see something as "unprocessed" as possible, check out William Castleman's 2009 time-lapse of a "star party."

 

[Mouse]

I think you're certainly right about some of them -- in fact as I understood the commentary they acknowledged the winner had done just that, one of the reasons I would have marked it down.

Same, TJ. I can't help but feel it's cheating a little.

Post-processing is very common in astrophotography these days. Every planetary probe and space telescope is guilty. But if you want to see something as "unprocessed" as possible, check out William Castleman's 2009 time-lapse of a "star party."

Now that's much better!

 

[Vertigo]

In fairness as Metryq says post-processing of astronomical photos is really an essential part of what they have to do and I suspect that is why in this competition it is encouraged.

There's also a big part of me that says post-processing is all part of the creation of a piece of art.

 

[Metryq]

All electronic cameras perform some kind of processing between the pickup device and recording of the data. Even olde fashioned analog video had factors known as gamma, knee curve, etc. For that matter, celluloid and paper photography is not 100 percent "honest" either because these artificial systems do not see the world the way the human eye (and brain) does. For example, the technology to reproduce the "latitude" of the real world—meaning the gamut of energy from deepest black to blinding white—is only now becoming possible with HDRI (high dynamic range imaging). So everything less than that is a compromise of exposure. The same goes for "color temperature," which even your brain performs automatically. So are you really seeing the world as it is?

Most post-processing is a formula culling of data. In digital cameras, the DSP (digital signal processor) sits between the pickup and the recorder. Many higher end DSLRs can record in a "RAW" format which removes much of the DSP. The result is a much larger file that can be "tweaked" by the photographer at a later time. Instead of having to "bracket" a shot by maybe a half stop, or even a full stop, the camera stores the full gamut of what its pickup can see. There are many high end, professional "digital cinema" cameras that record with essentially no DSP, but these things are incredible data hogs. They are generally used for live action special effects plates, while the main portion of the movie is captured with more conventional "video" cameras.

Aside from in-camera DSP, there may be a host of reasons to launder the data. Adjustable plane film cameras were often used to photograph architecture—maintain the integrity of all the verticals. Nowadays there are many "distortion" filters to correct such curves caused by the camera lens. Is that really cheating? (The following example demonstrates this function, although specialized filters may be much subtler and less "brute force" about it.)

Panoramic stitching is actually much closer to what space telescopes and space probes require. Space photos may be made up of many exposures (like the panoramic stitching noted above) and at a variety of wavelengths. The mountain of photos of a moon or planet must be stitched together, then "lens corrected" for the movement of the spacecraft, as well as compiling all the daylight photos into a planet-wide image. The software engineers do their best to make filters that are as "honest" as possible. When colors or elevations are exaggerated, it is usually noted (such as the Astronomy Picture of the Day site).

But is all of this what you would really see if you were there in person? No, actually it is better.

 

[The Judge]

The science/technology of it is beyond me, but I do accept what you're saying, Metryq, that there's no "pure" photograph, as it were. And the bumping up of colours, or the removal of extraneous noise, or the un-curving of things, that I can accept -- it's manipulating what is there, certainly, but not utterly falsifying it. But to my mind there must be a limit as to what is allowed before the whole concept of its being a photograph is made a lie. The shot of the sun with the space station on it, for instance -- in the commentary they make a great thing of the split-second timing it took to get that shot, which is indeed incredible. But if it were in fact two separate photos, one of the sun, one of the station, and someone had taken the station and superimposed it on the sun to make a composite, then to my mind that would be false and would devalue the whole contest.

I do accept, Vertigo, that post-processing is part of the creation of art. But this isn't a contest for art, it's a contest of photography, so to my mind should be judged in a different way. Which is probably why they didn't ask me to judge it!

 

[alchemist]

There's also a big part of me that says post-processing is all part of the creation of a piece of art.

I take on board everyting Metyrq says, but some of these are perilously close to "artists impressions," which for me, is not photography.

 

[Metryq]

The shot of the sun with the space station on it, for instance -- in the commentary they make a great thing of the split-second timing it took to get that shot, which is indeed incredible.

I think I know the shot you're referring to. (I did not see the photos at the above link, as I do not allow Flash on my machine. But I saw such a photo earlier this year.) The silhouette of ISS transiting the Sun is "real." And the timing would have been tight. Photographing one of the inner planets transiting the sun is much easier, as the planet is much farther away from us (making the transit take longer), which also makes the photographer's location less of a problem. However, ISS moves so rapidly against the sky, and its closer proximity makes the angular size of the sun much more critical. Of course, many DSLRs also record high resolution video, or can otherwise capture a sequence, thus easing one factor for the photographer.

And yes, I agree that there is a dividing line between necessary processing and total artifice. For example, I remember a high res video from earlier this year featuring images from a space probe of one of the gas giants. (Saturn?) The images all came from a space probe, granted, but the artist had "cut-and-pasted" them together into animated views unlike anything actually seen by the spacecraft.

For comparison, the Voyagers took sequences of shots during their close passages. Some of those sequences were then "time-lapsed" together for the same time every day, thus resulting in a high speed approach animation showing cloud patterns and moons speeding by. Those frames might also have been adjusted to keep the planet—the primary reference—stable (known as motion-tracking). All of that is okay.

But the "fake" high res video I mentioned earlier eliminated all that. For example, a given satellite stayed in the same relative position throughout the shot, rather than moving along its orbit. The resulting view was no longer a time-lapse, but an entirely artificial view, as though taken from a spacecraft thousands of times faster than any ever built my man. The artist might well have taken planetary "texture maps" gathered by space probes, dumped them into a 3D animation package, and called the resulting imagery "actual views from a spacecraft." That's complete fakery.

 

[Vertigo]

It's actually an interesting area. The dviding line between journalistic photos, tidied up photos, artistically enhanced photos, and just plain fakery has always been grey ever since the invention of photography. I detest any photo that is deliberately telling a lie but at the same time I would sometimes spend hours every evening for a couple of weeks working on printing just a single negative. At the end you often wouldn't think the final print and the "straight" print were from the same negative.

 

[Metryq]

I'm sure this is old news for a forum like this, but in the interest of space photos turned into other imagery I thought I would mention the free, multi-platform planetarium software Celestia.

The app can be expanded with add-ons from the Celestia Motherlode. Add-ons include instructional, planetarium-style tours, real spacecraft (Apollo, space probes), fictional spacecraft from Star Trek, 2001, Star Wars, and others. There are even fictional planetary systems and the "Collier's" ships imagined by Von Braun, Willy Ley, and painted by Chesley Bonestell.

I've calculated where the Firefly/Serenity trinary system should be, and one of these days I'll get my butt in gear and create all the texture maps for those planets and moons—not forgetting Miranda. (I'll have to go through my notes, but somewhere—one of the episodes or the movie—alluded to an old star sighting that later turned out to be an early sighting of Pluto. Based on the date and recorded magnitude, I figured where and how far from Earth such a star system should be. After that, it's just modeling all those planets and moons so they don't crash into each other.)

 

[K. Riehl]

I have the APOD site as my background. Many of the pictures from Hubble and other telescopes have the false color enhancements to illustrate the subject of the photograph. While it is not what you would see through the lens of the telescope it sure makes for prettier pictures.