I find the idea of "the planets as they would appear if you were really there" very appealing and have thought about it for years. But "un-edited raw imagery" is just the beginning - surely you can't rely on the unadjusted data having the frequency response of the human eye any more than the heavily massaged pictures one usually sees. It seems like a major project that would take significant expertise to try to reproduce what the human eye would see up close.
I really like the idea of raw unedited data. The closer we get to captured scientific data the better the feeling of exploring the planet in real life is for me. The whole artistic spirit of realism leaves me a bit flat because it ends up being like Jurassic park dinosaurs - the missing parts filled in with frog DNA and jacked up for theme park amusement. Colours blown out, infinite camera perspectives, musical stings and character plot or gamified systems of interaction.
Exploring raw data is closer to participating in electronic discovery than exploring an artists attempt at making a huge empty planet palatable to the spending consumer.
Depends on what you mean with "raw data", the pictures shown in the post are clearly calibrated data: you can tell because there isn't a lot of noise and other camera artefacts.
you totally captured the emotional response I had to these CD-ROM sets... I just wish I'd written it better, but that's just it there.
It was certainly cool to decode the raw stuff myself, although Iv'e been told so many times since I wrote that to either 'enjoy' the artistic version, or get some 'better' version of these things already transmogrified... But I wanted to do it myself!
It really did feel like I was accomplishing something when I got the first image to render, I guess it's the Ikea fallacy? Oh sure any idiot can click on a JPEG but can you follow well documented steps, and use a highly portable program to let you reproduce the same images?
Either way, I had fun doing it, although it feels like I did this a lot longer than a year ago...
ah yes, this is exactly the same reason why "#nofilter" has bothered me: there's always a filter between raw pixel intensities and what is actually captured / displayed as a photo. and that's completely ignoring things like white balance and HDR...
agreed on the appeal of seeing celestial bodies "as if we were actually there"
It wouldn't be that major of a project with today's equipment. Just attach any modern camera. However, most of those missions were designed around equipment available decades before they are actually being used, so they are outdated by today's standards but were high end back then. Also, B&W sensors with filters have so much more resolution than dividing by the RGBG pixel arrangement. Maybe Carl Sagan will have had enough of an impact that future mission will include a "regular" camera specifically for the function of making everything more human relatable.
There's also a limit imposed by the ability to return data to earth. I'm thinking of New Horizons, for example. The spacecraft took about 8000 measurements or photos in it's rendezvous with the Pluto system. It totalled about 6 GB of data that took 15 months to return to earth (with a maximum effective rate of 2kbps). Obviously Saturn is closer, and you could get a better transfer rate, but at some point you hit a limit of how many pictures you can take versus what image quality you can accept.
I'm willing to take those limitations. While Pluto is just Goofy, we could start with the other planets. What would Jupiter's clouds look like? Venus? We receive much more information from the orbiters of these planets, so hopefully on future missions (please let us keep them going) we can get these images. Honestly, I'd be happy to receive a JPEG from a modern DSLR just to save space, but obviously the RAW would be ideal. After all, if we're doing this, let's do it.
