Good point. I have nothing but admiration for the pix such as you cite.
The xkcd pic is a bit of that plus the whimsical banner towing airplanes the photgrapher must have paid to fly by at the right moment. And the bowman. And the unseen falconer one hill over.
That sort of stuff is what I object to. As well as pix where they gather an hours’ worth of Milky Way light with good glass then invert it into still water below an equally long exposure of the Milky Way in the sky.
Plus a hill taken on another night in another country. And they or APOD pass it off as a scene that a human could really experience. Nope.
I suppose I’d still distinguish between artificial one-upmanship (i.e., paying a plane to fly a banner) vs. photos that are 100% fake.
Most space pics are false color at the least. That’s kinda fake, but understandable. The data is still real, just the mapping to our brains is not.
But yeah, composites with way-too-bright galaxies, or a moon that’s way too large (perspective tricks can sometimes accomplish this, but not in all cases), etc. bug me. They all look pretty fake IMO, though maybe that’s confirmation bias.
I agree. That’s a more nuanced position than mine upthread and is worthy of support. Well done.
I’m of two minds about the common false color nebula pix.
Clearly my eyes can’t see those frequencies, neither can they detect the nebula’s attowatt (if that) level output nor the micro-arcsecond resolution required to form a representative image.
And like a conventional paper road map, it’s a way to harness our powerful human visual processing system to consume and make decisions about data that we can’t directly sense with our body’s natural abilities.
And yet … and yet. Some of the nebula photos seem as over-the-top works of imagination as an ancient terrestrial globe complete with sea monsters stalking the deeps and dragons guarding far off lands.
It’s not a picture of reality any more than a graph of GDP is the economy. But either can be very informative about their subject. The mistake is in labeling them as being their subject. The map is not the terrain.
Agreed. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what triggers my sense of “ok, that’s not how I’d see it but it’s still pretty much real” vs. “eh, that’s a stretch”. Ideally there’s some physical intuition kicking in, but maybe I’m just overconfident.
Back to the comic, I suppose I’d say that he’s answering the question of “When these people run out of simultaneous events that are likely to happen in the next century, where do they go next?” And the answer is that they make their own events. So just kiiiinda dipping into the fake end of the spectrum for the sake of keeping ahead in the arms race.
I’m not aware of anyone having actually done anything like this, though I am amused at the less-than-savory possibilities. Like setting up a NOTAM just so airliners will have to divert in a way that makes it into your shot.
I hadn’t seen that, and it does fit the bill. I’m more impressed than not though, since the goal was to recreate a classic movie scene without CGI/special effects. So they’re coming at it from the other direction in a sense. Instead of it being a thing supposed to look real/spontaneous except they sorta cheated, they took an unreal image and filmed it in a mostly-real way.
Though you just know that photo got posted to social media with a title like DESTITUTE PAKISTANI BOY JUMPS HIS BIKE OVER THE RIVER TO MAKE IT TO HIS NIGHT JOB AT THE FACTORY AMAZING!!1!1
I dunno; I could make the case that false-color nebula pictures are actually more real than the “true color” ones. All “true color” means is that the chose filters that approximate the color response of the human eye… but what does a nebula care about human eyes? The “false” colors instead tell you things like where the ionized hydrogen is and where the temperature is low enough to get molecular water, and so on, and those are a lot more important to nebulae than human eyes are.
Yet another illegal alien drug-dealing rapist uses a bike and ramp to jump over our heroic border wall and invade the GLORIOUS USA! USA! #TrumpRulz#BidenDrulz !!11!!!
Obviously, the second to the top layer has slipped off into the 4th dimension.
Thanks for posting this. I started this thread and usually post the link to the latest strip, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest if someone else does it. Saves me the bother.
