NASA spools up ultra-high def aurora movie

NASA has released an illuminating ultra-high definition video featuring the Auroras Borealis and Australis as seen from the International Space Station. The movie was put together by "video delivery infrastructure solution" firm Harmonic, to punt the space agency's NASA TV UHD. NASA's linear 2160p60 service launched last …

[m0rt]

"NASA spools up ultra-high def aurora movie"

Bah. And here I was, thinking that the top secret Aurora project was filmed by NASA and we were going to see some supersonic flying goodness.

Still, good movie.

[Camilla Smythe]

Amazeballs

I wonder if they ever get bored with watching it or rather anticipating the good bits in order to take time off from some boring experiment so they can pull up window seats and chill to the spectacle....

Is PopCorn available in Space?

[BebopWeBop]

Great movie but for the sensitive, turn off the sound

[Alex King]

Very pretty

But honestly couldn't watch to the end on account of the horrendous musak.

[Fatman]

Re: Very pretty

<quote>on account of the horrendous musak.</quote>

I turned OFF the sound.

[Ugotta B. Kiddingme]

fiery streak at 4:48 mark

Bottom center of the screen. Is that a slow-moving meteor or space junk burning up on atmospheric entry or a rocket launch, presumably headed for the station?

[Known Hero]

Re: fiery streak at 4:48 mark

Common, we all know its definite proof of ufo's landing and abducting people !!

[mr.K]

Stop fiddling

I think space is quite interesting in itself, they should really stop enhancing everything. It is actually often quite hard to find the unaltered photos. So then the high def picture of Pluto out there is false colour, the Ceres composite animation shows that it has very high peaks and craters and a spectacular view of the stars and Venus isn't cloudy. And apparently the ISS goes really fast and the cities on Earth are all burning.

You are not in marketing, you are really into education and most of the visual stuff from NASA (and other agencies) has the same educational value as a fantasy poster.

Mine is the mundane one.

[phuzz]

Re: Stop fiddling

The reason that NASA (or ESA for that matter) release false-colour pictures is because they never had a true-colour image in the first place. The telescopes on (eg) the New Horizon probe are not the same as the camera in your phone, for all that they use similar technology and they're optimised for a set of wavelengths that the project scientists hope will show the features that they're investigating, not what will make pretty pictures.

Of course, the public who ultimately fund the missions still want to see pretty pictures, so the output from the scientific instruments is processed to produce an output which is something like what a human eye would see, but a truly accurate image would involve a lot more work, and you'd end up with a very uninteresting image.

As an example, if you were hitching a ride with New Horizons and you looked at Pluto, you wouldn't see anything like this image, you'd be lucky to see any colours at all (not to mention that you wouldn't be able to see such small features with just your eyes).

Short version, images from space usually have to go through processing to make them human visible, and making a version that looks like a naked eye view is very difficult and of no practical use.

[A K Stiles]

Pretty, but...

I gave up after about 2 minutes, without the musak. I thought some of the shots were fabulous but the 10 second scenes with jump cuts were doing my head in.

It just about gave you time to find an interesting feature you wanted to watch and then jumped to another view altogether.

So frustrating! Or is it just me?