• Deconceptualist@lemm.eeEnglish
    57·
    2 months ago

    Yeah so maybe both Neptune and Uranus look hazy and dull green in visible light. So what?! They’re both entire worlds, significantly larger and vastly different in climate and tilt and composition and weather phenomena than our own, and we’re lucky enough to have seen them up close with probes. They have layered structure that can be seen in other wavelengths (e.g. infrared) and so many mysteries we haven’t yet conceived. Plus a ton of moons each that are weird and fascinating in their own right. They’re not the least bit boring to a curious mind.

    • stembolts@programming.dev
      32·
      2 months ago

      Plus they are gas planets. Fart miners are about to be rich with farts.
      Your welcome for this contribution of taste and intellect.

      • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        Honestly it’s the shitpost community so kinda fitting. Too bad your miners won’t find much stinky sulfur after their decade+ journey.

  • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
    56·
    2 months ago

    When the developers thought their model was so far out of the potential view distance of the player they didn’t bother making a texture for it.

  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
    39·
    2 months ago

    How did it take until 2023 to discern the true color of a planet we’ve known about since before humans found Antarctica?

    • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeEnglish
      62·
      2 months ago

      Serious answer: the sensors in telescopes and probes don’t work exactly like human eyes. They pick up a different range of frequencies than our cone cells in the first place, and don’t have the same sort of overlapping input curves. There’s a lot of tricks and techniques in converting an image into the same sort of thing we’d see with the naked eye. You can sorta think of it like translating Japanese into English; there’s no perfect formula and it requires some creative interpretation no matter what.

      The popular images that get published all over are simplistic composites and never really reflect the actual data astronomers rely on, so that was never a hindrance to scientific progress. It suddenly made the news because a research group decided to reevaluate the old data and reinterpret it against calibrations from other equipment (e.g. Voyager probe vs. the Very Large Telescope here on Earth). There’s a general interest factor in “wow that looks so much different than the old pictures”, when the underlying data really hasn’t changed.

      • Skua@kbin.social
        37·
        2 months ago

        To add to this, we apparently always knew. The famous blue image is more or less the correct hue, but the saturation has been absolutely blown out like a clickbait youtube thumbnail in order to show faint features more clearly. Somewhere along the line we stopped mentioning that that had been done. Irwin and co just just re-calculated it to get the most accurate version yet, because we’ve got a lot more data to work with now than we did back when Voyager 2 did its fly-by

        • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Sort of? My understanding from reading a handful of articles is that Neptune has a bluish haze layer that’s absent on Uranus, but it’s fairly subtle and the overall color of both is a pretty similar frosty light green. So it’s not just that it got oversaturated but that that particular blue hue got applied to the whole planet and not just a thin layer.

      • wandermind@sopuli.xyz
        18·
        2 months ago

        Furthermore, it’s not that the original scientists failed to produce true-color images. The original published images of Neptune had deliberately enhanced colors to better show some of the features of the cloud surface, and the description text of the images said as much. But that nuance was quickly forgotten and everybody just took the deep blue coloring to reflect the actual color of the planet, which spread to depictions of the planet everywhere.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
      34·
      2 months ago

      Similar reason why these three photos look like slightly different colors: image sensor type, quality, and postprocessing.

      Older images, less accurate. Especially if the type of image a system is capturing is not meant to be consistent with the human eye.

      • booly@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 months ago

        not meant to be consistent with the human eye.

        Even then, postprocessing is inevitable.

        As the white/gold versus blue/black dress debate showed, our perception of color is heavily influenced by context, and is more than just a simple algorithm of which rods and cone cells were activated while viewing an image.

      • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        How would they even know unless the ones doing the colour-blindness study are part of the 3%

  • lath@lemmy.world
    24·
    2 months ago

    TFW you thought you were cool, but it turns out you had a yee yee ass haircut all along.

  • PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.com
    14·
    2 months ago

    Nasa is ruining every planet one-by-one. First pluto wasn’t a planet. Then neptune is even more boring and stupid than previously thought. Next thing we know, Mars isn’t a planet anymore because planets aren’t red.

    • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      Technically the concept of a planet is a social construct. Scientists have been scurrying around redefining the definition of a planet to exclude asteroids ever since they discovered them. Why can’t they just say that the Earth is a wet asteroid and be done with it?

    • omega_x3@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 months ago

      Well I mean why is Mercury still a planet? It didn’t clear it’s own orbit, it just happens to be in an empty orbit.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        A hell-sphere that would be easier to fix than Mars, which is an entirely different type of hell-sphere. Just toss in enough ice to make eventual oceans and some cyanobacteria, and it should calm down in a few hundred thousand years.

        Short of an artificial black hole at its center to raise the gravity, I don’t see how we could ever terraform Mars. There’s not enough gravity for anything that evolved here to be healthy there.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          Maybe looking at it the wrong way. Mars becomes a place to visit. Turn it into an ecosystem full of stuff that can survive the low gravity. Insects and plants. You know after you stripmine it.

          Go visit the weird ass nature reserves from your spinning space habitat.

          • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            That’s certainly an option, but right now it seems most space agencies are totally ignoring Venus as a possibility, and are focused on a Mars colony.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 months ago

              Well Mars colony would be easier at the moment.

              As much as I don’t particularly like the man I think Bezos was right. We already have a place with ideal gravity. The future should be orbiting colonies. Imagine processes that could be done under fully controlled conditions.

        • CaptBobbers@mas.to
          2·
          2 months ago

          @AngryCommieKender @root_beer
          Floating cities in the clouds of Venus mining carbon dioxide and nitrogen out of the atmosphere, sending all those excess gases to Mars, the Belt, and the moons of the gas giants for terraforming and habitats.

          Car Salesman: * slaps the Venusian atmosphere * “You can fit so many Martians under this bad boy.”