Starship Asterisk*

Flase wrote:Obviously this is is fun but I notice that even the CGI Vesta has no colour data.

I believe Vesta is one of the most colourful asteroids with a lot of red hues on its surface. So this is not what it would "be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta"...

In terms of the visible spectrum, "brown" refers to high wavelength (low frequency) hues, yellow, orange, or red, in combination with low luminance or saturation.

http://news.discovery.com/space/neil-degrasse-tyson-tightens-titanic-accuracy-120402.html wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

'Titanic' Accuracy Tightened by Neil deGrasse Tyson
by Ian O'Neill, Discovery News, Mon Apr 2, 2012

<<James Cameron's epic 1997 movie "Titanic" is about to be re-released and re-packaged in a 3D presentation to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ocean liner on April 15, 1912. Although few changes have been made to the movie itself, there is one tweak that will impress astronomers.

Spurred on by a "snarky" message from astrophysicist and outspoken science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cameron has addressed Tyson's criticism that the incorrect star field was used during one of the film's most famous scenes.

"Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year, in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose (Kate Winslet) is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen," said Cameron. And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said 'All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I'll put it in the movie.'"

According to the Telegraph, Tyson did just that and the correct star field has been included in the re-release.

Tyson's views on "Titanic" have been expressed on more than one occasion and during a panel discussion at St. Petersburg College, Fla., in 2009, he detailed his beef with the movie, just after the scene where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) has drowned and Rose is delirious and adrift:

"There she is looking up. There is only one sky she should have been looking at ... and it was the wrong sky! Worse than that, it was not only the wrong sky; the left-half of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right-half of the sky! It was not only wrong, it was lazy! And I'm thinking, this is wrong."

It's not that "Titanic" was a scientifically inaccurate movie, on the contrary according to Tyson. It was the fact that Cameron was so detail oriented he even sent a submersible down to the real Titanic wreck to study the precise detail of the ship's decor. Everything was replicated, but to then mess up something as basic as the night sky is what frustrated Tyson.

Obviously, this is generally a fun argument. Unless you're an astronomer, you probably wouldn't have noticed the incorrect star field. But Tyson has brought up a very important issue. (Although, as detailed by Tyson in the video below, Cameron's response to Tyson's complaint was totally valid, and pretty funny.)

Movie makers need to be aware of scientific accuracy in their creations. At the 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in San Diego, at a session organized by The Science and Entertainment Exchange, it was agreed that while any movie needn't be scientifically correct to be entertaining, some of the most memorable movies are scientifically correct.

Members of the Exchange and other scientifically-correct moviegoers (like myself) aren't being curmudgeonly against clueless directors; we are simply expressing a genuine concern that presenting bogus science in movies as fact -- like the killer neutrinos of "2012" or the silly solar flares of "Knowing" -- do more harm than good. Real science shouldn't be an option, and for the most part, having a science adviser on the set is probably a good idea.

Cameron generally does a good job with the science in his movies (although the floating mountains of "Avatar" required some serious suspension of disbelief, but hey, that was some serious science fiction) and as this most recent inclusion of Tyson's correct star field in the "Titanic" re-release shows, he's not willing to give up on being a perfectionist any time soon.>>

Flase wrote:
Vesta is the only asteroid you can see with the naked eye, so I assume that means it has an unusually high albedo...

starstruck wrote:
FYI to whoever it is that needs to know about these things, I seem to be having problems accessing the links from 'above video' and 'Divalia Fossa', I get a "Not Found" error when clicking on them.

orin stepanek wrote:

starstruck wrote:
FYI to whoever it is that needs to know about these things, I seem to be having problems accessing the links from 'above video' and 'Divalia Fossa', I get a "Not Found" error when clicking on them.

I also could not access those links.

Last, Dawn images were digitally recast with exaggerated height to better reveal Vesta's 5-km high mountain Aricia Tholus.

ta152h0 wrote:
I bet you an ice cold one that if you fly over the Earth with a space station, without the vertical exageration, you would not find Mt Everest. Oh wait a minute, there is a space station up there. Perhaps we can convince them to take a picture w/o vertical exageration and dare us mere mortals to find it ?

ta152h0 wrote:I bet you an ice cold one that if you fly over the Earth with a space station, without the vertical exageration, you would not find Mt Everest.

Aristaeus wrote:I thought Vesta is the largest asteroid and Ceres is a dwarf planet???

wanna_be wrote:

ta152h0 wrote:
I bet you an ice cold one that if you fly over the Earth with a space station, without the vertical exageration, you would not find Mt Everest.

The discovery of Mount Everest illustrates your point. Its height was found as part of a general survey using the most exacting technology available. It was only after the number crunching that it came up as the tallest mountain in the world. It did not stick up above the others from the perespective of the surveyors, due to its distance. It was named for the previous Surveyor-General of India by the Surveyor-General of India, over the former's objection.

• Peak XV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2 wrote:

<<K2 is the second-highest mountain on Earth, after Mount Everest. With a peak elevation of 8,611 m, K2 is part of the Karakoram Range

The name K2 is derived from the notation used by the Great Trigonometric Survey. Thomas Montgomerie made the first survey of the Karakoram from Mount Haramukh, some 210 km to the south, and sketched the two most prominent peaks, labelling them K1 and K2.

The policy of the Great Trigonometric Survey was to use local names for mountains wherever possible and K1 was found to be known locally as Masherbrum. K2, however, appeared not to have acquired a local name, possibly due to its remoteness. The mountain is not visible from Askole, the last village to the south, or from the nearest habitation to the north, and is only fleetingly glimpsed from the end of the Baltoro Glacier, beyond which few local people would have ventured. The name Chogori, derived from two Balti words, chhogo ("big") and ri ("mountain") (شاہگوری) has been suggested as a local name, but evidence for its widespread use is scant. It may have been a compound name invented by Western explorers or simply a bemused reply to the question "What's that called?" It does, however, form the basis for the name Qogir (simplified Chinese: 乔戈里峰; traditional Chinese: 喬戈里峰; pinyin: Qiáogēlǐ Fēng) by which Chinese authorities officially refer to the peak.

Lacking a local name, the name Mount Godwin-Austen was suggested, in honor of Henry Godwin-Austen, an early explorer of the area, and while the name was rejected by the Royal Geographical Society it was used on several maps, and continues to be used occasionally. The surveyor's mark, K2, therefore continues to be the name by which the mountain is commonly known. It is now also used in the Balti language, rendered as Kechu or Ketu (Urdu: کے ٹو). The Italian climber Fosco Maraini argued in his account of the ascent of Gasherbrum IV that while the name of K2 owes its origin to chance, its clipped, impersonal nature is highly appropriate for so remote and challenging a mountain. He concluded that it was ... " just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the nakedness of the world before the first man – or of the cindered planet after the last."