Pseudoscience/NASA Photoshopped Images
NASA's Photoshopped Images
I remember when I was younger I had a huge, glossy, full color book of space. I would flip through the book, stare at these pictures, and my imagination would go wild wondering what wonders could be hidden in the galaxy. These images were accompanied by text, that would describe millions of years after the big gang and the millions of light years away these images supposedly came from. The text was so atheistic it actually made me ill to see how much nonsense was made up, yet, I still loved the images.
After researching flat-earth, I ran across the realization that NASA Photoshops the images. So, not only is the text disgusting, the images are too. Doesn't NASA produce anything worth looking at, have they ever?
The Secret Behind All of NASA's Gorgeous Space Photos? Photoshop, of Course
The images captured by telescopes like Hubble, or even consumer DSLR cameras, are taken over and over at very high quality and then manipulated. Amateur photo editors can use tools like DeepSkyStacker and Nebulosity — there's an entire suite of usable programs — but usually, the stars are heavily Photoshopped.
"I basically take raw grayscale data from different parts of the infrared spectrum, and then remap them into visible colors — typically with red, green and blue Photoshop layers — to create images that are representative of the infrared colors that human eyes cannot see"
Granted, software can be used as a tool to enhance images, which could help the viewer notice things that were too subtle to notice unedited. So, there's a good purpose for images to be Photoshopped. However, when you have to take images and wrap them onto a sphere shape, apply lighting and shadows, I would argue that you've disqualified that image from being taken seriously.
When Robert Simmon, Lead Data Visualizer and Information Designer at NASA was asked "What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done as part of your job at Goddard?", he said:
The last time anyone took a photograph from above low Earth orbit that showed an entire hemisphere (one side of a globe) was in 1972 during Apollo 17. NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites were designed to give a check-up of Earth’s health. By 2002, we finally had enough data to make a snap shot of the entire Earth. So we did. The hard part was creating a flat map of the Earth’s surface with four months’ of satellite data. Reto Stockli, now at the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, did much of this work. Then we wrapped the flat map around a ball. My part was integrating the surface, clouds, and oceans to match people’s expectations of how Earth looks from space. That ball became the famous Blue Marble.
I was happy with it but had no idea how widespread it would become. We never thought it would become an icon. I certainly never thought that I would become “Mr. Blue Marble.”
Photoshop wasn't invented in the 60's
Now people get triggered and say Photoshop wasn't around in the 60's... However, believe it or not, people like Stanley Kubrick knew a thing or two about making fake things look real.
[Work in progress]