Tweets about lossless sharing of astronomical images

Related: A desktop photo scanner can get 6400 dots per inch over 8.5*11 inches. That is 3.82976  GigaPixels with 32 bit colors.

See also: PetaPixelProject.com with many 10 to 100 GigaPixel images. They use “Atlas Browser Based Viewer” that seems to work.  I am not recommending it, just noting they seem to be able to show large lossless? images fairly readily.

“GigaPixel” on Google search has 930,000 entry points – a fairly mature topic. “PetaPixel” is mostly commercial now, but I see “2.2 Gigapixel photo”. For the Internet, I want consistency and ease of use for 4.8 Billion users if they want to do science, not pretty pictures.

Go down a ways and there is a 24113*23588*3 lossless image of Titan PIA17655 “Titans North Full Resolution” at photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/titan That is 568.777444 MegaPx. People do share useful forms, but most web images use lossy formats. What is ExaScale for, if not to share real data?

Oh, I get your point. Twitter itself won’t store much. But that does not prevent anyone from sharing by link. I felt obligated to learn what Twitter is doing, can do, and ought to do. Nice work you are doing!! I think Internet sharing should be lossless.

Here is a 10848*10848 image in jpeg, so almost completely useless. That is 117,679,104 or 117.679 MegaPixels. And the same image in GeoTiff (lossless). star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk. Just need a link to a file.

Yes, there are lossless formats offered. But you gave a lossy format first and that is the one probably copied, that ends up all over the Internet. Thank you the beautiful image, but more thank you for the beautiful data.

Richard K Collins

About: Richard K Collins

Director, The Internet Foundation Studying formation and optimized collaboration of global communities. Applying the Internet to solve global problems and build sustainable communities. Internet policies, standards and best practices.


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