by Chris Peterson » Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:41 pm
srm wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 7:26 pm
What i always wonder about all those images from juno and other space probes taking picture of our solar systems planets. A. Why is the picture quality so bad considering they use cameras that costs millions more than an average high end professional cameras?
You have a funny definition of "bad" picture quality. Juno perhaps has some of the worst quality images, because its camera is not a primary science instrument, but is mainly for public outreach, and has specifications and performance not unlike a consumer digital camera. Still pretty good, IMO. Most missions have cameras that are part of their primary instrument package. These cameras return very high quality data... although you may not always see what they are capable of, given that images are commonly reduced in size and compressed into 8 bits or less per channel. Also, those cameras typically image through filters, so the ability to reconstruct accurate color (which is usually not scientifically interesting) is frequently limited.
and B. why do they never record some videos? Considering the efficient image compression algorithms we have for images and videos, size shouldn't be a big deal.
Because for the most part, nothing happens that is interesting at multiple frames per second. You do often see timelapse videos built from lower frame rate data.
[quote=srm post_id=287559 time=1542914760]
What i always wonder about all those images from juno and other space probes taking picture of our solar systems planets. A. Why is the picture quality so bad considering they use cameras that costs millions more than an average high end professional cameras?[/quote]
You have a funny definition of "bad" picture quality. Juno perhaps has some of the worst quality images, because its camera is not a primary science instrument, but is mainly for public outreach, and has specifications and performance not unlike a consumer digital camera. Still pretty good, IMO. Most missions have cameras that are part of their primary instrument package. These cameras return very high quality data... although you may not always see what they are capable of, given that images are commonly reduced in size and compressed into 8 bits or less per channel. Also, those cameras typically image through filters, so the ability to reconstruct accurate color (which is usually not scientifically interesting) is frequently limited.
[quote]and B. why do they never record some videos? Considering the efficient image compression algorithms we have for images and videos, size shouldn't be a big deal.
[/quote]
Because for the most part, nothing happens that is interesting at multiple frames per second. You do often see timelapse videos built from lower frame rate data.