Let me start to state that i do enjoy the images presented at APOD. Keep up the good work! Thanks to professional and 'amafessional' enthousiasts we, the Internet people, can see things we will never see in our lifetime with our own eyes, from the cosiness of our warm deskchairs. We do not have to suffer the agony of long freezing nights, harsh conditions, windchill and fatigue.Dean Drumheller wrote:Exactly. "The word "composite" is so important, and simple. That's ALL I was pointing out. No name calling, or judgement of any kind intended !Dean
Next is a suggestion. In science it is common practice to keep a logbook, in which results of all your experiments are recorded. Such a log will enable to recreate the results, independently of the original observers and equipment. Reproducibility is one of the main pilars of science.
It is open to debate whether an image is an objective (meant as non-subjective) scientific result, subjected to scrutiny of others, or art, the subjective interpretation of the feelings of creator of the image. IMO an image is science. From that point of view i would prefer to read how the image was created. In the old days, when working with negatives, i always stated how my results were obtained: made on Ilford HP4 film, developed in Microfen for 30 minutes at 25°C, a Praktica body, a 240 mm lense, 5 minutes exposure time, compensated for the drift of the stars on an azimuthal telescope. Such information not only opens a window for the reader to try to obtain similar results, it might even encourage to do so.
When i see glorious images e.g. the one Dean Drumheller has published, i'm absolutely in the dark whether such a result is within reach of my -very simple / basic- equipment. It is now an educated guess: probably not within reach. Providing the information how the images was obtained, how it was handled and reported on APOD, will contribute to the stimulation of amateurs to practice the photographic aspects of astronomy.
To state absolutely without any doubt, i do not care nor do i take sides in the discussion, whether an image is composite, preprocessed, enhanced, clarified, denoised, transformed, warped. Just tell me how!
Regards,
Henk
