> Instead they are compressed with Kris Becker’s implementation of Huffman encoding. Thankfully the source to the compression, and various manipulation tools are included in both C & Fortran.<p>As someone who often helps a spouse decode various police car/bodycams and random retail surveillance formats for court work, that always comes on DVDs, this makes me so jealous.<p>Imagine... having the source code to decode the image or video format right on the CD. In a portable C format.<p>And not having to install Windows XP to support whatever proprietary DRM'ed software that no longer has a support page on the internet, after 2hrs trying to get it working in a Windows 10 VM? Then leaving the whole OS VM installed on your laptop because you couldn't be bothered to do it twice...<p>I wish the local police hired NASA people to set up their systems.
I find the idea of "the planets as they would appear if you were really there" very appealing and have thought about it for years. But "un-edited raw imagery" is just the beginning - surely you can't rely on the unadjusted data having the frequency response of the human eye any more than the heavily massaged pictures one usually sees. It seems like a major project that would take significant expertise to try to reproduce what the human eye would see up close.
For an even more primal experience, it's worth looking at Saturn with your own eye through a telescope. An 8" reflector is fine. Even though it is obviously nothing like these photos, it is surreal to see that object up in the sky.
How discrete are the rings of Saturn? Do they look continuous due to the long exposure time of a photograph? Would they look more like an asteroid belt if we could increase the shutter speed?
Two days days ago this was on apod: <a href="https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html" rel="nofollow">https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html</a>
PDS Atlas is the best place to get this data: <a href="https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/" rel="nofollow">https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/</a> and USGS ISIS is the software to work with it: <a href="https://github.com/USGS-Astrogeology/ISIS3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/USGS-Astrogeology/ISIS3</a>
The touching up of photos by NASA is really interesting - I don’t want to fuel all of the mars conspiracies but undeniable that a lot of stuff in the mars photos is obviously airbrushed and there has been a transition from everything on mars being red hued to blue sky with lots of greys and browns in the landscape, it shows that NASA has taken a lot of artistic license. The Viking probes all had color calibration plates attached, so I’m pretty sure someone made the decision to tint the photos because “the public expected the red planet to be red”, then someone else made a different decision, so slowly the red hue is being replaced with natural colors just to save face.
I don’t really know anything about astronomy, but I noticed a planet at dawn and looked it up: Jupiter! Saturn and Mars are also super visible in the same part of the sky about an hour before sunrise. Pluto is lined up too but obviously not visible. Have a look!<p>SkyView was an app recommended to me, but it would be cool to have something a little more scientific. What’s a nerdier app I can’t try?
> like all old CD-ROM’s they are not quite ‘ISO CD9660’ enough so they don’t mount on Windows 10, or OS X.<p>Not sure what the issue was here, I was able to mount the file just fine on my Windows 10 machine