Presented with "A 5-year old asks: The Sun is a big hot ball. With colorful thermal IR images of ears as radiators, and false-color images of skin parasite distribution (thus mud baths) and so on. Now imagine a traveling exhibit on elephants. Years ago, NASA did a traveling museum exhibit on the Sun with lots of colorful images, but not a single white Sun. Would it seem odd to suggest adding a true-color visible-light photo? What if the authors color graded such a photo to hide a less marketable, say greenish cast? Imagine an article about a newly energy-efficient light bulb, which included only false-color thermal and near IR images - "Look, less waste heat and wasted light!". My overall thought here though is.> does not really mean much here impossible to directly observeĪs misconceptions are common around the Sun, sunlight, and colour, it can be helpful to crosscheck concepts by swapping the Sun for a more familiar object: a light bulb, display, wall, shirt, or elephant. Personally, as an experienced Topaz user for the past year, I'm in your camp - regardless of it being awarded APOD & other accolades, I'm firmly convinced that there is a mix of professional and amateur data blended here and attempt has been made to mask this in processing. Initially the image was called out, but some have rallied to the photographers' defence suggesting this is result of extensive overuse of Topaz in processing. I'm one of the IOTD judges on Astrobin, and there was a lengthy discussion about this image behind the scenes. While there are no prohibitions to over processing, in a contest environment my hope is the judges will spot the difference without much fuss and consider works more deserving. I have yet to see any 80mm telescope, even with the best AI sharpening, out-resolve a 0.5 metre class instrument. Rest assured if there is a dollar to be had, there will also be those who will cheat to get it. He even suggested having a new category: best fake. One would hope if entered into a contest the judges would spot such clumsy efforts and cull them accordingly.ĭavid Malin is a master at this, but even he admitted the "fakes" are getting better and more difficult to spot. There is also a good deal plain an simple plagiarism that goes on with images posted on the web.Īmazing how the object of interest has Hubble like details but the rest of the field is filled with low resolution blobs and the poster is too dim to realize their dodgy image is shouting out : "this is a fake" I know this has probably been discussed ad nauseam, but I couldn't seem to find any specific discussion, and I just want to hear what other people think How is it fair to compare data taken with a 24" Planewave to an 80mm refractor that is 'sharper' purely because of AI in a competition setting? I understand the general debate about whether Astrophotography more science or art, but I think this is a specific case where this distinction matters. Should people explicitly disclose when these algorithms are used, if submitting them to APOD or competitions? Should there be separate categories for AI sharpened data? I am interested in your thoughts about the use of these algorithms in astrophotography.Īt what point do our image processing algorithms change from manipulating information that is already within the data, to generating information that was never there? After seeing some impossibly sharp images on APOD and Astrobin IOTD recently, I asked around and found out that the trick behind them is Topaz Denoise AI and Sharpen AI.
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