What is It? What Isn’t It?
My last entry featured a lovely image of Saturn and several of its moons. I hope you had a chance to look it over because it’s really quite breathtaking. The image was part of a sequence of images that were taken with HST and those images were used to make a scientific visualization of the event. Was it a movie? An animation? Or what?
As Frank Summers, a scientific visualizer who works at Space Telescope Science Institute explains in a thought-provoking blog entry about the images and animation of this event (work done by artist Greg Bacon), HST is not a movie camera. It’s an observatory. And the images it takes can be used to make visualizations that help us understand the science behind the observations. There’s a fine line there and he discusses it in a nicely written entry about visualizations, movies, and animations.
Science visualizations are part of my life as a producer of various bits of media for astronomy outreach. I’m always on the lookout for good viz, so to speak, and in my own mind I know the difference between data-driven visualizations versus actual imagery. But, that may not be true of audience members who simply see the visual work and accept it as a simulation or real image or whatever it’s being represented as. Digital manipulation of data in the service of education and outreach is very common in our field. And, I suspect that we’ll always have the question of “is it visualization, an image or an animation?” And, when does it matter and when doesn’t it? Frank talks about that — so go check it out — from the blog of the master.
