Starship Asterisk*

National Parks Infinite Photo
National Geographic | Travel | 2011 Jan 28

Here's a project for you, Rob, an APOD infinite photo.

Wow! I like that it's infinitely zoomable, though from the description I expected it to be repixellated at every zoom level. But what they've done is worthy of a Wow! anyway.

Back in the mid-80s there was an artist here in Halifax that did large images -- about 8' wide, IIRC -- using as his starting point some iconic image from the news. The two I remember were the Challenger disaster image with the separating booster trails just after the explosion, and that image of Saddam Hussein and the obviously frightened American(?) boy. He recreated these using his own photographs of other subject matter which he cut into 1" squares and laboriously glued onto a substrate inch by inch to create a mosaic.

Now doing the same thing in digital form is a matter of a few clicks and a couple of minutes -- assuming you have thousands of thumbnail images to use as the mosaic tiles (thank you APPOD.) I haven't yet tried printing one of these mosaics to see what they're like in physical form, but the urge may yet overcome me.

Rob

I think (don't know for sure) what they have done is pixelate every photo used, so that when you zoom down to an individual image, you just start the process all over again with the new image. It would mean you would have to pixelate every APOD. You could use your anniversary apod as a starting point. Could you have it done by June 16?

Hmmm (hoping I'm not being taken seriously) if I had the largest available image of each APOD I could probably write an AppleScript which would cycle them through my mosaic program (Mazaika, in case you were wondering) and save a mosaic of each. It would take perhaps a half-day (I'm rusty) to write the AppleScript -- if Mazaika itself is AppleScriptable, that is -- and I'd need a large external drive on which to store the images. And lots of coffee and donuts. And, of yes, there's the small matter of earning a living which, despite my best attempts to ignore its hectoring, keeps popping up. So yes, it's doable -- in the same sense that parking the HST at the Moon's L2 point after its useful scientific life expires, to await use as a training tool for Space Cadets, is doable.

Rob

rstevenson wrote:Hmmm (hoping I'm not being taken seriously) if I had the largest available image of each APOD I could probably write an AppleScript which would cycle them through my mosaic program (Mazaika, in case you were wondering) and save a mosaic of each. It would take perhaps a half-day (I'm rusty) to write the AppleScript -- if Mazaika itself is AppleScriptable, that is -- and I'd need a large external drive on which to store the images. And lots of coffee and donuts. And, of yes, there's the small matter of earning a living which, despite my best attempts to ignore its hectoring, keeps popping up. So yes, it's doable -- in the same sense that parking the HST at the Moon's L2 point after its useful scientific life expires, to await use as a training tool for Space Cadets, is doable.

Unless you're running your own web server, I'd stay away from the AppleScript approach.

This project would be pretty easy using PHP, and in fact, there seem to be a few public implementations of PHP photo mosaic apps out there. Starting with one of those, it should be simple to build a database (I'd use MySQL) of image characteristics, and then build mosaics on the fly. All you'd need would be HTML to handle the pointing, which would avoid the use of Flash (which the NatGeo site unfortunately requires).

I do, in fact, run my own server. But no, I would never use AppleScript on it, simply because I would never run a server using an OS that could run AS. I was thinking of creating the APOD mosaics ahead of time, then dropping them into software which would present them. I thought this would be more sensible, since the idea of remaking the same image mosaic whenever it was called for seems unnecessarily processor-intensive.

Rob

rstevenson wrote:I do, in fact, run my own server. But no, I would never use AppleScript on it, simply because I would never run a server using an OS that could run AS. I was thinking of creating the APOD mosaics ahead of time, then dropping them into software which would present them. I thought this would be more sensible, since the idea of remaking the same image mosaic whenever it was called for seems unnecessarily processor-intensive.

Well, it's an obvious tradeoff between processing and storage. It depends on how you handle different zoom levels (such as a fixed grid versus arbitrary zoom centers), as well. But assuming your site isn't too popular, the computation approach is probably reasonable, and has the added advantage that it evolves with APOD. The prebuilt mosaics would require manual (or scripted) updating to accommodate new APODs.

rstevenson wrote:if I had the largest available image of each APOD

Starting Nov 1996, the APOD images for each month are in image directories identifiable by month, ~/apod/image/yymm/~. A downloader could be automated to download the images month by month. If you were really serious about doing it, I'm sure RJN would be happy to make the images available, possibly in monthly archives (to keep the size manageable).