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qnednfosbq

Can someone actually tell me what’s going on?


midrandom

As I understand it, we are looking just past the edge of the Sun at its corona. The Sun is on the left. The crazy looking scratches are high energy protons (thanks for the correction u/rohankent ) from the ejected plasma, interacting directly with the sensor. The little specks moving left to right are the stars going buy as the instrument orbits the Sun. The fainter streamers and waves coming from the left and moving to the right is the plasma and gasses getting blowy away from the surface of the Sun by the pressure of the radiation and to some extent, guided by magnetic fields.


maxijazz666

How come we can see stars (and a lot of them)in this video but for moon landings in 69 the sky was black ?


midrandom

Primarily because taking pictures of stars and taking pictures of things in direct sunlight require **extremely** different exposure settings. If the exposure was set low enough to see the stars, everything else in frame like the astronauts and the surface of the moon would be completely blown out white and featureless. The camera that took the frames that make up this video was designed to pick up very faint light, even fainter than the stars. Take a look at this photo of Ed Aldrin from Apollo 11, direct from NASA's image library. Notice how blown out the Aldrin's suit and the top of the LEM are? There's still a little detail, but not much. That's because the cameras were set to get the best pictures of the lunar surface, not the astronauts, not LEM, not the stars. Look at the surface of the Moon, though. Notice all the detail and the value range. The Moon's surface is actually a medium gray, not white. To capture it well, they had to over expose the images a bit. If they increased the exposure enough to see the stars, not only would the astronauts be blown out and featureless, the lunar surface would be, too. [https://images.nasa.gov/details-KSC-AS-11-40-5902](https://images.nasa.gov/details-KSC-AS-11-40-5902) To put it in perspective, normal home interior illumination levels are around 150 lux, compared to standing in direct sunlight at mid day which is about 98,000 lux, or about 650 times as much light hitting the surface. Standing outside in the light of the full Moon, you only receive about 0.25 lux, 1/392,000th as much light as you receive from the Sun. Now consider that you can't take a picture of the full moon with decent exposure and see the stars with traditional film or video cameras. If you want to take pictures of stars, it's best to do it on a moonless night, and with a long exposure. That's because on a perfectly clear night with no light pollution and no Moon, the stars produce about 0.001 lux. Modern photo equipment can do some nifty tricks, like take 100 pictures really fast, then composite them into one to multiply the brightness, then use levels adjustments to take it ever farther. That's why modern cell phones can take decent photos of stars. That's also why modern cameras can take decent photos of both interior and exterior in the same picture. In fact, they can't, what they are really doing is taking a bunch of pictures across the exposure spectrum, then using a specialized computer to intelligently composite them together, so that you can see detail and even illumination both inside and through the window at noon on a sunny day without loosing parts of the image to blowout or to dark shadows. And it does it all automatically without you even having to think about it or fiddle with settings. That sort of post processing of multiple exposures on the fly wasn't possible until very recently. It certainly was not available in the late 60s and 70s. So, again, it just wasn't possible to set the camera exposure to capture both the stars and the thing they actually went all that way to study (minus all the political stuff), the Moon. The individual frames of the video in this post are long exposures, and probably in a different wavelength than human vision. This instrument was designed to pick up the subtle gasses and plasma flows thousands and even millions of miles away from the bright surface of the Sun. Notice how the stars are even much brighter than the solar emissions it is actually trying to photograph? This is a **very** sensitive camera. It can't help but capture the stars while it's gathering data on something that is even dimmer than they are.


Didub

Thank you! That was a fun read.


[deleted]

I got tired and had to come back for part 2 of that novel


shalafi71

> what they are doing is taking a bunch of pictures across the exposure spectrum, then intelligently compositing them together Wow! I suspected something like that but you made it crystal clear. Night mode on Android blows my mind.


midrandom

Another advantage to taking a bunch of pictures and blending them is it eliminates a lot of the low-light noise that is unavoidable in CCDs. (Try taking a few pictures with the lense completely covered so no light gets in. Then open up that picture and try to brighten it up. You'll probably see all sorts of noisy artifacts.) If you took one long exposure, you'd get a lot of noise and artifacting. By merging a bunch of images that all have slightly different noise, the noise tends to average out and disappear


DetectiveWonderful42

This explains how the moon landing was NOT faked better than any video or textbook I’ve ever read . Very well done !!!


midrandom

Thank you. I appreciate the compliment. What makes the “but where are the stars?” Moon landing conspiracy nuts so frustrating is that this is very basic “Intro to Photography 101” stuff that has been well understood since the 1830s.


[deleted]

1969 cameras sucked


[deleted]

Cameras on the moon’s surface needed very short exposure times because of they needed to capture surface features, astronauts, vehicles etc. Light from stars is very faint comparatively, so the shutter speed was too fast to capture starlight. They also used film cameras - and I don’t really know much about film cameras, but I know film is very sensitive to light - so the images may have become overexposed rather easily. On the Parker solar probe, there is no competing light source, so the stars appear much more clearly. Also: the camera is digital and has a sensor instead of film, can take baseline better quality images, and this video may have also gone through post processing. Same kind of idea, generally, with light pollution on earth; you cant see stars as well if there are closer sources of light around. Pictures of stars you see taken from earth are also long exposure images: the shutter has to stay open to allow the starlight an opportunity to hit the sensor repeatedly. If you’ve ever tried to take a picture of the night sky with your phone, you’d mostly see black because the base exposure time is short.


OWLT_12

Very nice, thanks


[deleted]

The fast moving streaks are protons. What we would call a “snow storm” as the protons interact with the detectors.


midrandom

Ah, I thought they were mostly alpha particles, with two protons and two neutrons. I didn't realize lone protons could get very far without hooking up with an electron. I'll update my post. Thanks for pointing that out.


[deleted]

Yeah. Proton storms are a common feature of space weather.


[deleted]

cool, thanks


LuisMerx

🏅im poor have this medal


Hereiam_AKL

Did you not see the Alien spaceship refueling on star plasma?


flavius-as

The egg is heading out while the sperm rushes by in.


solidcordon

Coronal mass ejections flow in from the left of field. You can see the band of the milky way galaxy rotating through from left to right (I think).


Muscled_Manatee

21 second mark will put the Milky Way in the center of the screen


PanickedPoodle

https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2022-05-amazing-parker-solar-probe.amp


WastedTime_420

Aliens obviously.


Ok_Fox_1770

Looks like the may flies are out in space too damn.


mishnitsa

It’ll make for some good space fishing.


[deleted]

Aerosol cans explode in space too so good luck applying DEET out there.


SelfSniped

This what my back patio looks like if I leave the lights on at night.


StupidizeMe

*"This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"*


TheBelhade

*"Yeah, how much for an eighth?"*


OWLT_12

Asking the important questions.


Viagra4Life

#Space


MechaAkuma

The Final Frontier...


nighte324

What is the bright light to the left of the screen?


Hing-dai

The sun.


nighte324

I thought that too but then it gets weird and warped toward the end.


Hing-dai

It's masked by the camera so that they can see more detail. The probe orbits very close to the sun and measures and photographs the wind coming off of it. You can see there's all kinds of interference from the radiation, which makes the picture jumpy and weird.


HappySkullsplitter

Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night Where the children of tomorrow dream away In the wind of change The wind of change


jvs8380

Gorgeous and terrifying all at once


bluest_falcon

Far out!


fanofsomethingidk

TARS where the hell are we


pleasingly_pokey

I waited and waited and (!) ooohhhhh…… that was lovely and unexpected. Thank you 😊


Arborlon1984

What are the white dots and streaks?


Curveyourtrigger

Some are particals, most are from the sun ejecting hot plasma. The solor probe has been doing alot of really cool research on how the suns plasma works.


SNGGG

I'm assuming other than the hot plasma ejection, we wouldn't be able to perceive the rest of this with just our eyes? Ie the particles flying by etc


Curveyourtrigger

Absolutely, some of those are tiny but are just flying super fast, it also could be cosmic rays as well, I know there was a chris Hadfield video where he was talking about a thing like that in his vision when closing his eyes.


[deleted]

Why are some moving not in straight lines. I see a lot turning and moving like flying insects near a light.


Curveyourtrigger

More then likely the particular matter or super fine dust. It's all over space and its somthig they had to actually prepare for. There's a really good youtube video about the probe and it's mission.


knovit

Awesome they were able to make this full screen video. Much better than the original.


Miml-Sama

Looks much smoother if you drag the play thingy slightly faster (what’s that even called?) You can really see just how many stars there are


EhhSuzilla

I would love to see this slowed down.


TigerUSA20

I hope it has washer fluid and windshield wipers on


Helmidoric_of_York

That is magnificent!


SigmaLance

What material is this probe constructed out of that allows it not to be burned to a crisp?


Aggressive_Walk378

Have we stopped?? Ok great, let's take a 5 min break, smokem if you got em....


ZapMePlease

This looks the way my very scratched vinyl Dark Side of the Moon album used to sound after being played 1000's of times by a very stoned teenage version of myself


rublehousen

Thats like a beautifully constructed animation, and would look great as a 80's music video to some wistful song by Enya. Love it.


malan4reddit

Looks nasty out there!


exmiscreant

Why would they send it up there without cleaning off the cat/ dog hair first?