HUYGENS Titan photos have been altered!!

It's like the difference between dial-up and broadband. The spaceship sadly does not have the equivelent of a broadband connection back to Earth or we would be seeing DVD quality video. The pictures will never be as good as the ones we get from closer planets like Mars, mainly due to the additional losses from the much, much greater distance. I don't know what the ship actually transmits back at, but it must be like a tiddly little modem speed in comparison.
It would probably take a week to send back a really really good picture, and the poor little thing will have exhausted itself by then and failed....
To be able to get back as much information as we do is pretty astonishing.

All you have to do is think about the limitations we have in data speeds over our existing hardwire systems over only a few miles. Where I used to live was only a couple miles from town but we couldn't have broadband (until a couple months ago) because the exchange just couldn't handle it. When you've got to send data millions of miles with very little power and you only basically get one shot at it, with all the interferance around as well, etc - it is pretty good we get what we do!

[edit on 17-1-2005 by AgentSmith]

None... Just call the janitor that's been cleaning the Mars rover every night. He can drop by Titan with a packet of light bulbs.

What a sad, pathetic thread.

My guess is they are hiding something that is obviously organic. They don't want the scientist to start parading statistics around ofter life is discovered on 3 planets...although the statistics after finding life on 2 planets is dramatic enough...

Life on other planets is supposed to be a black ops program...not a scientific discovery...

Your title is very misleading! You should have put that the titan pictures "May" have been altered. You have no proof that they have been altered other than your lack of knowledge. There are plenty of other blurred spots on your photo and I can see why you might think this picture was altered. I have the picture from the CNN website as soon as it was put up. If you look closely, you can see that the rock extends out farther than it seems to in your picture. This rock sticking out this much further would explain why there is a shadow. So now you can stop posting about altered photos.


external image

If someone wants to save this go ahead. I am only going to keep it up a few days. Thanks.

Errr.... Don't want to seem ungrateful but can we have a working link please??
The red cross doesn't really prove anything one way or another at the moment....


Thanks.

[edit on 17-1-2005 by AgentSmith]

nothing seems to be altered, but thats always the case if i look at supposedly altered/faked pics from mars, bla, etc. maybe my eyes are really going out of business soon. really...datacompression, low bandwidth, a different and thick atmosphere and someone here can judge how these images are supposed to look like?

edit : that's the mysterios first and now unavailable image? no reason to waste more time..titan is waiting, simulated of course

[edit on 17-1-2005 by Hannah]

Bandwidth is totally irrelevent. You can transmit an entire DVD movie over 14.4 dialup if you have enough time, you're willing to accept data degradation, and you have a way to pick up where you left off after timeouts.

Degradation does not mean mysterious shadows suddenly appear. Degradation would be garbled and lost data resulting in blank sections. Degradation also does not mean that everything turns orange.

You can browse the raw triplets in a couple of websites...all the raw pics are greyscale. The fields test images before launch are also all greyscale. Why is everything orange now?

Raw Triplets Site 1:
www.lpl.arizona.edu...

Raw Triplets Site 2:
space.brownpau.com...

Field Test Images:
www.lpl.arizona.edu...

[edit on 17-1-2005 by Geneticus]

The surface temp on Titan is about -180 with lakes,rivers and even Oceans of ethane. What type of organic life do you really thik could survive there?

Heck mars is paradise compared to those conditions. There are much better places to suspect life in our solar system. Europa would be a great choice with its ocean of liquid water.

that's the point, as far as i know, the titan lander has not very much time to send the data back, thus bandwidth&datasize becomes very relevant. if bandwidth would be no problem we would have better pics from the latest landers/probes. why haven't we? conspiracy? i would say technical limitations..but you decide...for me, orbiter is waiting

You all are literally looking for a conspiracy theory under every rock!

There's no scientific basis for believing their could possibly be anything on Titan visable in a photo that anyone would want to hide, even if you believe governments would hide alien life forms. The place is a frozen rock. If there's any life on it (unlikely) it would be like bacteria. Accept the pictures for what they are!

It would take a very unsual technical limitation to make the images turn orange and make a shadow appear from nowhere...

1.the color pic ..

from www.esa.int :



get it? ...gives a better indication...following proccessing...

2. i dont see any shadow appearing from nowhere
3. shadows have nothing to do with the acual topic i talked about..bandwidth and the amount of data

Very true the Huygens only has a battery life of a few hours and its Relay Cassini is orbiting Saturn. When its on the other side of Saturn it can recieve no information from the Probe.

So they are working on a very small window.

This thread is not about bandwidth...it is about altered pics. In your quote above from ESA, they ADMIT ALTERING THE PHOTO!

What do you think "This is the coloured view" means?!? They ADDED COLOR! They say they needed to "add reflection spectra data"...that is what the camera is supposed to do. What else did they decide they needed to change about this photo after the fact?

People, people, one of the pictures was made orange to attempt to give an idea what Titan looks like in real color. Almost all pictures from space are black and white, the color is interpolated later on by computers.

The blurryness is just a JPEG compression artefact. You see evidence of it all over the picture. yawn.

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

From the text on this page:

" This image was returned yesterday, January 14, 2005, by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. This is the colored view, following processing to add reflection spectra data, and gives a better indication of the actual color of the surface. "

i just responded to your statement, that bandwidth is irrelevant, thats all. have i said this thread is about bandwidth? nope.

and regarding the color pic, i just wanted to explain, how the pic turned into a color pic. i never said that they did not alter the colors, with "i can see nothing altered" i meant your shadow thing, not the color photo because everyone who wants to know, can read how they did it..



[edit on 17-1-2005 by Hannah]

If you are talking Visible Light Reflected Spectra, then the only way to capture that is to take a traditional picture. You can use special sensors to take a near-infrared reflected spectra image, but that only tells you about topography and formation...maybe interaction with the atmosphere...but nothing to do with colors. Huygens is equipped with near infrared reflected spectra sensors, but that would in no way help you determine visible light color. Lies...all lies.