Starship Asterisk*

Just a suggestion. It's a bit of a pain to find and dig out my red/blue glasses for stereo APOD images, plus it's hard to find just the right shade of red and blue for my laptop. My suggestion is simply that whenever an APOD is a red/blue stereo image and it's not a panorama super-wide image, please provide a URL in the text of the APOD entry to a web page that contains greyscale side-by-side stereo pair images with the right image on the left and the left image on the right so those of us that can go cross-eyed and fuse the images into a 3D image can just do it that way. Plus, the image quality is much better this way. Thanks for considering the suggestion.

I'll second this idea!

Who's even got red/blue glasses anymore???!!!!

wtwhitener wrote:Who's even got red/blue glasses anymore???!!!!

I have, I got them very cheap from Ebay. They're the Shark Boy glasses that came with the film.
And I look very cool in them h'actually...

From the red and blue channels in the posted image... If you go crosseyed, don't blame me!



-Noel

Ahhhh - very nice! Thank you. If I wasn't so busy, I'd write a quick Java applet where you just type in a red/blue stereo image URL and it then loads, separates, and dispays them as in your posting. I also forgot to mention that there is no reason APOD color stereo images can't also have adjunct URLs for side-by-side stereo pairs. This would be great, for example, for Saturn and cineloops. This is something that red/blue stereo cannot do. Also, I won't go cross-eyed. I have found that going cross-eyed to fuse two side-by-side windows containing different versions of a C++ file allows one to rapidly go through a 1,000+ line file and immediately (within 30 seconds) see every single change (they "stick out"). It's much better than "diff". Not only can I do this for hours, but photogrammetrists do it all day long I believe with no ill effects.

Because I have only one sharp focusing eye I am unable to appreciate the occasional red/blue stereo pictures. I wonder if it would be possible to include with the Astronomy Picture of the Day a link to the same picture in in your normal sharp resolution in addition to the red/blue stereo version.

And here I thought I was the only one who compared files by superimposing them using my eyes.

-Noel

And I thought I was the only one that went cross-eyed to compare text files... Yes - if you haven't heard the expression, "if you get a good idea, there are at least 10 other people in the world that have gotten the same idea", is very true. Consider this carefully if you ever think you want to start a company based on an idea because that road can be very trecherous. When I get bored, say in a dentist's office with a textured pattern in the wallpaper, I'll go cross-eyed to find the spacing in the textured pattern to see where it repeats. Finally, let me mention that there are several stereo pairs of the Moon in this image: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... aveder.jpg except you have to do the opposite of cross-eyes to see them (make axis of vision in each eye less convergent and closer to being parallel such as when fixating on an object at a large distance). There's a specific technical term for this type of vision trick but I can't recall it.

mtaylorman wrote:Because I have only one sharp focusing eye I am unable to appreciate the occasional red/blue stereo pictures. I wonder if it would be possible to include with the Astronomy Picture of the Day a link to the same picture in in your normal sharp resolution in addition to the red/blue stereo version.

If you are talking about face on mars, it has been there quite a few times (see the link)

wtwhitener wrote:Who's even got red/blue glasses anymore???!!!!

<waving hand>

Me, me, me!

</waving hand>

I've always loved anaglyph 3D, and I've done a little myself. I have a nice pair of aviator style glasses with plastic frames, and I once had to wear them for a couple of weeks working on some 3D graphics for an advertising job. It really screwed with my sense of reality when I had to take them off, and walk around!

I say "mille grazie" or a thousand thanks for the anaglyph images on APOD.

I also collected 3D comics for a while, and the uncontested master, and a very cool guy is Ray Zone. Don't bother with the site if you don't have red/blue glasses - it should be viewed with them on.

jim