7 ms·

First TV Image of Mars: Interplanetary color by numbers (2016)

186 points by gdubs 4y ago

sidpatil 4y ago
This technique is generally known as indexed color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_color
- f272529 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    Does "Paint-by-Numbers" no longer mean indexed colour to the general population? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_by_number#/media/File:Картины_по_номерам.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_by_number#/media/File:Ка...
    - Sniffnoy 4y ago
      I mean, I would associate the term pretty strongly with indexed color with irregular regions, not with square pixels.
    - munchbunny 4y ago
      It usually does, but the article talks about manually drawing out a grayscale image by following luminance numbers. That’s generally not considered “indexed color” unless you’re using a mapping of pixel values to grayscale values (indexing) to reduce the number of valid pixel values for compression purposes.
      - rzzzt 4y ago
        This technique is generally known as false color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      To me it means I as a bad artist am just filling in colors likely with really bad color mixes on an image. It has a connotation of really low end art.
- nneonneo 4y ago
  It’s simpler than that; the pixels were just light intensity values (per the article, they had originally intended to get various shades of grey chalk). The scientists just wound up applying their own “palette” to the intensity values.
ryantgtg 4y ago
Kottke is back!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
guidoism 4y ago
When my dad was working on Landsat images in the early 1970s they used to print out pages upon pages of numbers, color them in with markers, tape them up on a big wall, and then take a picture of it with a regular color camera. That is how they could print out color satellite images!
- davchana 4y ago
  I did something in reverse. Our project was to maintain about 200 miles of a straight road in a diagonal direction on north-uo map, with another 90 miles road cutting it through making it a lop sided X. I screenshotted Google Maps satellite view at certain height. It were about 30 sgots wide & 50 shots tall. Then cropped out the rectangle from shot with no distance scale, or search box. Then joined everything in Photoshop by hand. Then printed it as one gigantic page pdf. Then printed it on A3 pages as tiles with 1 inch overlap. Portrait wise 5 pages wide & 4 tall. Then trimmed every sheet on right & bottom except the last sheet on left & bottom. Then pasted them with glue. Cello tape on the back. Then everything goes on the wall. Then other people could use pushpins & stuff to mark the progress & program.
  - lisper 4y ago
    People forget that cut-and-paste used to be literally cut and paste.
    - RheingoldRiver 4y ago
      Incredibly trivial example but, I did this for baseball score cards as a kid. My dad had internet at work but we didn't at home, so he printed some baseball score cards for me at work, and brought them home so I could pick one. But I wasn't happy with any particular one of them, so I went to our local copy shop and sat there for a couple hours happily cutting and gluing together the elements from all of them that I wanted to create the ultimate baseball score card.
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    InkAtlas does this for OSM tiles. I've used it a bit, but never needed a map large enough to use the paid option.
VincentEvans 4y ago
[flagged]
jeffbee 4y ago
It does not make a lot of sense to me that it would take hours for a computer to generate an image, but the computer could promptly print out the data in human decimal representation.
- lisper 4y ago
  You have to remember that back in those days, for a computer to generate an image did not mean for it to render an image on a screen like we do today. It meant generating an image to be printed on paper using the same kind of technology that was used for printing magazines and newspapers. That was a time-consuming physical process, not so much a time-consuming computational process (though it was probably that too back in 1965).
- idlewords 4y ago
  The issue was not processing time but bitrate. Mariner 4 sent data back at something like 8 bits per second, and the science team printed it and colored it as it came in.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I agree. I used to print images by using characters with more ink for the darker blots, down to a single dot (period) or even a blank space for the lightest. Looked pretty good.
pvorb 4y ago
> Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. [...] It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It’s as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I'm sceptical. If you look at Mars from Earth, you can see it's red even without a telescope.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wheelerof4te 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the science guy in the 70's knew which color Mars was.
- abhorrence 4y ago
  The article isn’t saying that he didn’t know it was red, but rather that he wasn’t actively thinking about trying to match the color. Obviously there’s a question of conscious vs subconscious thought, but the claim is at least that he chose red/brown because it would represent grayscale well.
- m463 4y ago
  Coming from a blue planet there might be some color bias. We should really observe from the moon which seems to have a neutral color.
  - zxcvbn4038 4y ago
    This is where I start to give credit to a lot of Mars conspiracies. I know that the cameras on the Viking probes were tested and calibrated on Earth to give accurate colors, the probes themselves had color calibration chips on their hulls that the cameras could use for testing and recalibration, yet for some reason the sky and ground on mars was always shown as red hued (like in the 80s Total Recall movie), or maybe the sky was a little yellowish - until it wasn’t! Suddenly one day Mars had a blue sky and most of the rocks are grey, and only the soil is red. Not any real explanation I’ve ever heard, just oh by the way the sky on Mars is blue, in other news…
osigurdson 4y ago
>> “The thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind”. Not sure about that. It was assumed to be red since 400BC [1]. One needs only to look at it without the aid of a telescope to jump to the conclusion that it might be red. [1] https://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/mystique/history/early/ https://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/mystique/history/early/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ncallaway 4y ago
  To me that sentence doesn’t mean “the scientist didn’t know Mars was probably red”, but rather means “the scientist didn’t pick red to try and color match Mars, but for a different reason”
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    It seems unlikely to me. I get that he wanted to do greyscale since that is all of the information that the sensors provided. However, picking a non-red colour set, knowing that the planet is red is absurd.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Eh, maybe? We can’t reach into his mind. I really don’t see a motivation for them to lie in this particular context (literally no one would be mad if they said “we choose red markers because we thought Mars was probably red”). And I can understand being in a frantic state of mind to decode the first image of Mars as fast as possible, and the conscious consideration of the color set just not coming up. That sounds perfectly plausible to me. If that story is true, I’d also be pretty inclined to believe they were subconsciously influenced to pick a red color, even while hurrying. So, I don’t think it’s a total coincidence, but nothing about the story sounds particularly far fetched to me.
      - osigurdson 4y ago
poszlem 4y ago
Makes me think of the early satellite photography that was captured using analogue cameras, which were mounted on satellites orbiting the Earth. When the satellite finished its mission, the camera would be released and fall back to Earth, attached to a parachute. A team of technicians would then locate the camera, retrieve it, and bring it back to a laboratory where the film would be developed by hand in a dark room. This process was labor-intensive and required a great deal of expertise in order to produce high-quality images.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://kottke.org/22/12/our-first-closeup-image-of-mars-was-a-paint-by-numbers-pastel-drawing https://kottke.org/22/12/our-first-closeup-image-of-mars-was..., which points to this.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Is there anywhere to get the actual image data, in either text or bitmap form? The photo of the print version isn't terrible but it's not particularly good either.
lanewinfield 4y ago
For those in or are visiting the LA area, this image is on display on the free-to-the-public JPL tour. Highly recommend! https://jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/ https://jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/
tmpburning 4y ago
That's kind of a weird way to put it... as if the image came from the TV?
- creatonez 4y ago
  "TV" in this case is short for "televised". That is, it came via a radio signal, rather than being physical film brought back from Mars. But of course, the bandwidth is far too low to be an NTSC signal and it was digital rather than analog, so actual existing TV equipment couldn't have helped. For the moon landings, it was an actual NTSC television signal generated on the surface of the moon, amplified by ground receivers, passed through real-time scan conversion to bring the FPS to 30, and sent to broadcasters.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

186 points by gdubs 4y ago

This technique is generally known as indexed color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_color

f272529 4y ago
[flagged]
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Does "Paint-by-Numbers" no longer mean indexed colour to the general population? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_by_number#/media/File:Картины_по_номерам.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_by_number#/media/File:Ка...
  - Sniffnoy 4y ago
    I mean, I would associate the term pretty strongly with indexed color with irregular regions, not with square pixels.
  - munchbunny 4y ago
    It usually does, but the article talks about manually drawing out a grayscale image by following luminance numbers. That’s generally not considered “indexed color” unless you’re using a mapping of pixel values to grayscale values (indexing) to reduce the number of valid pixel values for compression purposes.
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      This technique is generally known as false color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    To me it means I as a bad artist am just filling in colors likely with really bad color mixes on an image. It has a connotation of really low end art.
nneonneo 4y ago
It’s simpler than that; the pixels were just light intensity values (per the article, they had originally intended to get various shades of grey chalk). The scientists just wound up applying their own “palette” to the intensity values.

ryantgtg 4y ago

Kottke is back!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

guidoism 4y ago

When my dad was working on Landsat images in the early 1970s they used to print out pages upon pages of numbers, color them in with markers, tape them up on a big wall, and then take a picture of it with a regular color camera. That is how they could print out color satellite images!

davchana 4y ago
I did something in reverse. Our project was to maintain about 200 miles of a straight road in a diagonal direction on north-uo map, with another 90 miles road cutting it through making it a lop sided X. I screenshotted Google Maps satellite view at certain height. It were about 30 sgots wide & 50 shots tall. Then cropped out the rectangle from shot with no distance scale, or search box. Then joined everything in Photoshop by hand. Then printed it as one gigantic page pdf. Then printed it on A3 pages as tiles with 1 inch overlap. Portrait wise 5 pages wide & 4 tall. Then trimmed every sheet on right & bottom except the last sheet on left & bottom. Then pasted them with glue. Cello tape on the back. Then everything goes on the wall. Then other people could use pushpins & stuff to mark the progress & program.
- lisper 4y ago
  People forget that cut-and-paste used to be literally cut and paste.
  - RheingoldRiver 4y ago
    Incredibly trivial example but, I did this for baseball score cards as a kid. My dad had internet at work but we didn't at home, so he printed some baseball score cards for me at work, and brought them home so I could pick one. But I wasn't happy with any particular one of them, so I went to our local copy shop and sat there for a couple hours happily cutting and gluing together the elements from all of them that I wanted to create the ultimate baseball score card.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  InkAtlas does this for OSM tiles. I've used it a bit, but never needed a map large enough to use the paid option.

VincentEvans 4y ago

[flagged]

jeffbee 4y ago

It does not make a lot of sense to me that it would take hours for a computer to generate an image, but the computer could promptly print out the data in human decimal representation.

lisper 4y ago
You have to remember that back in those days, for a computer to generate an image did not mean for it to render an image on a screen like we do today. It meant generating an image to be printed on paper using the same kind of technology that was used for printing magazines and newspapers. That was a time-consuming physical process, not so much a time-consuming computational process (though it was probably that too back in 1965).
idlewords 4y ago
The issue was not processing time but bitrate. Mariner 4 sent data back at something like 8 bits per second, and the science team printed it and colored it as it came in.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
I agree. I used to print images by using characters with more ink for the darker blots, down to a single dot (period) or even a blank space for the lightest. Looked pretty good.

pvorb 4y ago

> Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. [...] It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It’s as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I'm sceptical. If you look at Mars from Earth, you can see it's red even without a telescope.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wheelerof4te 4y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the science guy in the 70's knew which color Mars was.
abhorrence 4y ago
The article isn’t saying that he didn’t know it was red, but rather that he wasn’t actively thinking about trying to match the color. Obviously there’s a question of conscious vs subconscious thought, but the claim is at least that he chose red/brown because it would represent grayscale well.
m463 4y ago
Coming from a blue planet there might be some color bias. We should really observe from the moon which seems to have a neutral color.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  This is where I start to give credit to a lot of Mars conspiracies. I know that the cameras on the Viking probes were tested and calibrated on Earth to give accurate colors, the probes themselves had color calibration chips on their hulls that the cameras could use for testing and recalibration, yet for some reason the sky and ground on mars was always shown as red hued (like in the 80s Total Recall movie), or maybe the sky was a little yellowish - until it wasn’t! Suddenly one day Mars had a blue sky and most of the rocks are grey, and only the soil is red. Not any real explanation I’ve ever heard, just oh by the way the sky on Mars is blue, in other news…

osigurdson 4y ago

>> “The thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind”. Not sure about that. It was assumed to be red since 400BC [1]. One needs only to look at it without the aid of a telescope to jump to the conclusion that it might be red. [1] https://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/mystique/history/early/ https://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/mystique/history/early/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ncallaway 4y ago
To me that sentence doesn’t mean “the scientist didn’t know Mars was probably red”, but rather means “the scientist didn’t pick red to try and color match Mars, but for a different reason”
- osigurdson 4y ago
  It seems unlikely to me. I get that he wanted to do greyscale since that is all of the information that the sensors provided. However, picking a non-red colour set, knowing that the planet is red is absurd.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    Eh, maybe? We can’t reach into his mind. I really don’t see a motivation for them to lie in this particular context (literally no one would be mad if they said “we choose red markers because we thought Mars was probably red”). And I can understand being in a frantic state of mind to decode the first image of Mars as fast as possible, and the conscious consideration of the color set just not coming up. That sounds perfectly plausible to me. If that story is true, I’d also be pretty inclined to believe they were subconsciously influenced to pick a red color, even while hurrying. So, I don’t think it’s a total coincidence, but nothing about the story sounds particularly far fetched to me.
    - osigurdson 4y ago

poszlem 4y ago

Makes me think of the early satellite photography that was captured using analogue cameras, which were mounted on satellites orbiting the Earth. When the satellite finished its mission, the camera would be released and fall back to Earth, attached to a parachute. A team of technicians would then locate the camera, retrieve it, and bring it back to a laboratory where the film would be developed by hand in a dark room. This process was labor-intensive and required a great deal of expertise in order to produce high-quality images.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://kottke.org/22/12/our-first-closeup-image-of-mars-was-a-paint-by-numbers-pastel-drawing https://kottke.org/22/12/our-first-closeup-image-of-mars-was..., which points to this.

Dylan16807 4y ago

Is there anywhere to get the actual image data, in either text or bitmap form? The photo of the print version isn't terrible but it's not particularly good either.

lanewinfield 4y ago

For those in or are visiting the LA area, this image is on display on the free-to-the-public JPL tour. Highly recommend! https://jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/ https://jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/

tmpburning 4y ago

That's kind of a weird way to put it... as if the image came from the TV?

creatonez 4y ago
"TV" in this case is short for "televised". That is, it came via a radio signal, rather than being physical film brought back from Mars. But of course, the bandwidth is far too low to be an NTSC signal and it was digital rather than analog, so actual existing TV equipment couldn't have helped. For the moon landings, it was an actual NTSC television signal generated on the surface of the moon, amplified by ground receivers, passed through real-time scan conversion to bring the FPS to 30, and sent to broadcasters.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]