<story><title>New Horizons phones home</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33531811</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot; view of the surface of Titan[1], and it&amp;#x27;s annoying me again now.&lt;p&gt;What this image shows is the &lt;i&gt;average&lt;/i&gt; color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot; label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia.&lt;p&gt;To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot;, try the following experiment:&lt;p&gt;1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden.&lt;p&gt;2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel.&lt;p&gt;3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden.&lt;p&gt;4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a &amp;quot;true-color&amp;quot; view of said rose-garden.&lt;p&gt;See the problem with this?&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- &lt;i&gt;especially&lt;/i&gt; if you&amp;#x27;ve then gone on to &lt;i&gt;tell&lt;/i&gt; them that it&amp;#x27;s a true-color image. In truth, it&amp;#x27;s no more &amp;quot;true-color&amp;quot; than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they&amp;#x27;re looking at something far more drab than they actually are.&lt;p&gt;Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn&amp;#x27;t colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more drab than reality.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Titan_(moon)#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Titan_(moon)#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Huyge...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>semiel</author><text>The &amp;quot;sepia&amp;quot; is actually true color. New Horizon&amp;#x27;s high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.</text></item><item><author>hohenheim</author><text>Any idea why the colour changes from grey to sepia between 12&amp;#x27;th and 13&amp;#x27;th July?</text></item><item><author>pserwylo</author><text>For a more interactive version of this, check out the visualization by ABC News in Australia:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.abc.net.au&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;2015-07-09&amp;#x2F;pluto-comes-into-focus&amp;#x2F;6566818&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.abc.net.au&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;2015-07-09&amp;#x2F;pluto-comes-into-focus...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.</text></item><item><author>zacharycohn</author><text>This is the most incredible picture I have ever seen. In May, the best picture of Pluto was a couple blown up pixels. Now, it looks like a render from a Pixar movie.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;tothur&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;620601134651166720&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;tothur&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;620601134651166720&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Steuard</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s a case to be made even for &amp;quot;average hue applied to the whole image&amp;quot;: it&amp;#x27;s very easy to look at a black and white planet photo and assume that the whole thing is made of grey rock (since our own familiar Moon is pretty close to exactly that). I made that mistake myself for quite a long time. So using the average hue is one step better than that, or at least no worse.&lt;p&gt;But my impression has been that they often do something more sophisticated: they have a high resolution greyscale image and a lower resolution color image (maybe just a few pixels, or maybe as much as half or a quarter of the greyscale resolution). Colorizing the higher resolution image using the lower one in that case seems &lt;i&gt;entirely&lt;/i&gt; acceptable. (In fact, doesn&amp;#x27;t JPEG generally do something very similar for color images almost all the time?)&lt;p&gt;Do I have that wrong? Or is it just that NASA isn&amp;#x27;t good about reporting the relative resolution of the color component of their &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot; images? (That would be really nice, come to think of it: &amp;quot;This image of Enceladus has detail resolution 150x150 and color resolution 50x50.&amp;quot;)</text></comment>
<story><title>New Horizons phones home</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33531811</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot; view of the surface of Titan[1], and it&amp;#x27;s annoying me again now.&lt;p&gt;What this image shows is the &lt;i&gt;average&lt;/i&gt; color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot; label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia.&lt;p&gt;To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot;, try the following experiment:&lt;p&gt;1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden.&lt;p&gt;2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel.&lt;p&gt;3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden.&lt;p&gt;4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a &amp;quot;true-color&amp;quot; view of said rose-garden.&lt;p&gt;See the problem with this?&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- &lt;i&gt;especially&lt;/i&gt; if you&amp;#x27;ve then gone on to &lt;i&gt;tell&lt;/i&gt; them that it&amp;#x27;s a true-color image. In truth, it&amp;#x27;s no more &amp;quot;true-color&amp;quot; than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they&amp;#x27;re looking at something far more drab than they actually are.&lt;p&gt;Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn&amp;#x27;t colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more drab than reality.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Titan_(moon)#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Titan_(moon)#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Huyge...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>semiel</author><text>The &amp;quot;sepia&amp;quot; is actually true color. New Horizon&amp;#x27;s high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.</text></item><item><author>hohenheim</author><text>Any idea why the colour changes from grey to sepia between 12&amp;#x27;th and 13&amp;#x27;th July?</text></item><item><author>pserwylo</author><text>For a more interactive version of this, check out the visualization by ABC News in Australia:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.abc.net.au&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;2015-07-09&amp;#x2F;pluto-comes-into-focus&amp;#x2F;6566818&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.abc.net.au&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;2015-07-09&amp;#x2F;pluto-comes-into-focus...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.</text></item><item><author>zacharycohn</author><text>This is the most incredible picture I have ever seen. In May, the best picture of Pluto was a couple blown up pixels. Now, it looks like a render from a Pixar movie.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;tothur&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;620601134651166720&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;tothur&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;620601134651166720&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>By that standard everything you literally see is not &amp;quot;true color&amp;quot;.  Subsampled chroma is a property of all &amp;quot;color&amp;quot; information because that&amp;#x27;s the way your eyes actually work.  This is a Hobgoblin&amp;#x27;s argument.  Just complain that their chroma sampling is too coarse and put the pitchforks away please.</text></comment>