[ad_1]
The picture above looks like an example of abstract art, but it is not painting.
It is actually a photograph of the cloudy sky above Jupiter, taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 18th flyby of the solar system giant.
We can see a huge storm sweeping the planet, the clouds resembling swirls of paint.
The photo is a photograph taken from space that has been enhanced by Kevin M Gill, a NASA software engineer who has developed an online tracking for his stunning spatial images.
This particular image was published on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Photojournal website at the end of February. The space agency blog pays tribute to Mr. Gill for capturing the "dramatic atmospheric characteristics" of the northern hemisphere of Jupiter.
It has since been shared on the Internet, making comparisons with the work of Vincent Van Gough.
Asked about the creative side of his work, Mr. Gill was reluctant to consider himself a great painter.
"I do not really consider myself an artist," he said.
"I rely a lot on the art inherent in nature.
"[But] I've had works presented in art galleries and what I do is a bit artistic, I guess … "
How do you create a masterpiece of space from data?
Mr. Gill's image was taken on February 12, 2019, when Juno was about 13,000 kilometers above the clouds of Jupiter.
It was created using NASA's Junocam Imager, a publicly available resource where astrophotography enthusiasts can view the Juno mission data.
This online tool shows where Mr. Gill bought the captured solar system before improving it.
Juno captures the images of Jupiter, but the sensors are configured as tapes on the camera. The red, green, blue and methane pixels are therefore separated.
This gives the raw images a "weird stripe and jagged appearance," but Mr. Gill has developed a process that refines it by correcting raw data and improving color.
"[This process] translates the color values in the data of what the camera has encoded for transmission to the Earth into an appropriate RGB value and applies weightings to each color channel to account for the specific sensitivity of the sensor's colors ", a- he declared.
"Then he takes out the tapes, reprojects them on the map and reassembles them all, all aligned."
Some extra tweaks, 3D modeling, and some creative problem solving give spectacular results.
This is a process that probably takes less time than it would take to install an easel and mix the right paint colors.
"I've automated a lot of my JunoCam treatment, so it's pretty fast, maybe ten or fifteen minutes," Gill said.
"I have tried to quickly process most of my imaging work.
"With full-time work and children, I do not have a lot of time to spare."
Mr. Gill is a software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, United States, who describes himself as a "data manager".
But his work on Juno images was purely amateurish, NASA designating him as a "citizen citizen" in the Photojournal blog.
He has a general fascination with all planets and moons, but some planets attract him more than others.
"I guess I like gas giants," he said.
"Saturn and Jupiter exert a particular fascination for me, each for its own qualities.
"I guess I'd like to be there to see them in person."
Gill publishes his work on Flickr and publishes visualization videos on his YouTube channel.
NASA calls for creativity
The Junocam tool was launched in the hope that space enthusiasts would help render images taken with the spacecraft.
"With a very small professional operations team and a community of professionals involved in active Jupiter observation, we rely on the public to define the key elements of the Junocam operation," says a report. of 2014 from NASA.
"The public is an essential part of our virtual team.
"Some possible areas of effort are feature tracking, visualizations using other Juno instrument data and / or ground observations, methane mapping, and false colors.
"The basic treatments will be done by image processing professionals, but we will mainly encourage the general public to be creative."
ABC
Source link
