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2003-09-10 - 7:30 p.m. Allison M. Heinrichs wrote a 2,000 word article in the L. A. Times a couple days ago about the images from The Hubble Space Telescope. Being a graphics guy I knew that all the amazing images have been altered, I didn't say faked. And it never occurred to me that anything might be amiss here. I like the images. Looking at grey globs is fine for the professional astromer since they know what they are looking at and hence it is amazing. We can't even see images, if you can call them that in radio waves, or infrared, or scores of other ways they have of "looking." So what kind of got me about the article was that NASA sees the colorful renditions as a marketing ploy. Hubble cost 1.5 Billion. And 250 million a year to operate. NASA's annual budget is 15 billion. NASA even has a public relations director. "NASA has been at the forefront of marketing their world, and there is nothing wrong with marketing a good idea," said Felice Frankel, an MIT science photographer. "Somebody there knew how powerful images can be to get people on the side of research. NASA has found this language that makes astronomy accessible, and it has worked because they continue to get major, major funding." Zoltan Levay, one of Hubble's, uh, photographic artists, describes the production of the colorful Hubble images as a "reconstruction process." Hubble sends its snapshots back to Earth in grainy black and white, and then Levay and other artists at the Space Telescope Science Institute clean up the images and digitally colorize them. Levay likens the process to nature photography, in which images are often adjusted to make subjects look more ideal. In the Kaufman Focus Guides, a series of books used by bird watchers to help them identify their targets, photographer Ken Kaufman modifies his images to enhance identifying marks. "Different field marks [of the bird] may not be showing up as prominently as he would like, so he'll touch them up so that they are visible," said Lisa A. White, an associate director at Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of the guide books. "He's aiming for an ideal version of the bird." But we the people aren't paying some bird people 15 billion a year. My point is, space is kinda cool, but so are birds and most other stuff if the right spin is put on it, or someone who writes really well can make anything interesting, and faking, uh, altering, uh, "reconstructing" a photo is fine with me. But using it as a marketing play doesn't put me in my happy place. I've never been a fan of NASA. Right after the first moon landing where what's-his-name blew his line, he was supposed to say, "This is one small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind." Instead he said, "One small step for man�" Man and mankind means the same thing. Anyway after whitey landed on the moon I was in San Francisco on the Warf and this one guy printed up a fake newspapers that had a picture of Armstrong on the lunar surface next to an American flag and the headline screamer said, "SO WHAT!" � 
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