Donald E Davis

@TheOldManPar @PaulMSmithphoto It appears to be captured with a camera capable of low light color video, with the best frame selected.

@PaulMSmithphoto I'd love to hear a breakdown of how you got that shot...

At 11.40pm last night, a monster positive lightning bolt lit up the sky just East of Norman, Oklahoma. And I was in Texas with my camera pointed above that storm, and captured the giant red sprite it produced.

@JPMajor @exploreplanets @NASAJPL That was a fun project, done for the Mars episode of 'Cosmos'. Layers of foam core and gesso with the details carved with a Dremel tool.

@exploreplanets @NASAJPL Wonderful piece there by @DDAVISSPACEART too!

Gentry Lee spent nearly 50 years at @NASAJPL helping lead some of the most ambitious missions in space exploration. The documentary “Starman” traces his career—and the question that drove it: Is there life beyond Earth? Lee worked on every NASA mission that landed on Mars, helped Carl Sagan bring the Universe to TV with “Cosmos,” and later served as Chief Engineer for JPL’s Solar System Exploration Directorate. Listen as Sarah Al-Ahmed sits down with Lee at The Planetary Society headquarters on Planetary Radio. 🎙️ planetary.org/planetary-radi…

@DonaldPMitchell It has been done, a few even show cloud structure. It always looked white and featureless to me, allowing for atmospheric filtering.

@DDAVISSPACEART Venus is more tricky. It's always low in the sky, as a morning star or evening star. The seeing is bad, looking thru a great depth of atmosphere, Rayleigh scatter is messing with the colors. I don't think I've ever seen a good telescope image of Venus.

What color is Mars? Time to call the colorimetry police. In fact, it's tricky to take space camera data and calculate accurate sRGB values. Almost all images are just three more-or-less red/green/blue channels and slamming them together into a color jpeg.

@Space360HQ Oh well, Some other time...

The James Webb Space Telescope helped rule out a possible lunar impact in 2032. Observations of asteroid 2024 YR4, which is currently 4 billion times fainter than the faintest star visible to the unaided eye, has refined its orbit and confirmed it will safely miss both Earth and the Moon in 2032. More: science.nasa.gov/blogs/webb/202… Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Rivkin (JHUAPL), and J. de Wit (MIT)

@DonaldPMitchell Through a telescope the light areas of Mars appear to me about the color of a ripe apricot.

@DonaldPMitchell This is the closest to a close eyeball view of Mars, but that is partially subjective because of sunlit surface area seen against the blackness of space. Here are color chips I made based on Andy Young's work, the right tries to account for albedo, the left a 'telescope' view.

@Mikeachim @TheEternalPepe I read of this long ago in Willy Ley's book 'Engineers' Dreams.

@TheEternalPepe Oh hell yes. Madness! I wrote about it here: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/the-worst-da…

A while back, I learned something mindblowing about the geological history of the Mediterranean Sea, and I just can't get it out of my head. Now I'm going to make it *your* problem too. Sorry. Hang onto your hat. This gets wild. 1/

@astro_Pettit I usually see the glow of Las Vegas from Joshua Tree, CA 160 miles away. The brightness of the 'light dome' over it varies with the dust etc content of the air, and the relative heights of the illuminated cloud ceiling over it can be seen to vary over different nights.

Las Vegas, Nevada, perhaps the brightest place on Earth! The new Vegas Sphere is centered, appearing from orbit as a distinct dot of light beside the famous Strip.

@JamesLucasIT The color is guesswork. That removes something like this from the historical record.

This is what Jerusalem looked like in 1897 Real footage from exactly 129 years ago

@CultureExploreX There are some modern monuments etc that are comparably awesome. Here are some nominations: The Burj Khalifa skyscraper 'The Motherland Calls' Stalingrad memorial statue The Chrysler Building in New York If we can go back further: The Taj Mahal The Potola palace Hagia Sophia

If ancient civilizations built the Seven Wonders thousands of years ago with primitive tools, why does modern civilization struggle to create monuments that inspire the same awe today?

@MissAlly_01 From the The 10 February 1953 issue of the Soviet Krokodil magazine. Here is the original with the Russian text.

@konstructivizm The changes over time will be fascinating to see over generations to come.

Naked-eye Supernova 1987A exploded 39 years ago today

@tophz_ A great film that was a decent transcription of the classic Graphic Novel/Comic series. The casting was incredibly good to me as one who read and loved the original. A major change in the climax didn't hurt. This film is also a kind of tribute to the Baby Boomer generation.

Movie 🎥 title; Watchmen (2009)

One of the greatest superhero films of all time, hands down. Scene 🎬 🔥

@DonaldPMitchell @laszlogaal_ I was actually thinking about the rediscovered portion of 'Metropolis', which was a horribly scratched print that was apparently duplicated from a badly scratched nitrate print. But yes, I know about wet gate treatment.

@DDAVISSPACEART @laszlogaal_ Liquid shutter can also fix a lot of problems, projecting the film through a liquid with the same refractive index as the celluloid. Scratches and water damage mostly vanish.

@Eng_china5 It's getting there. I would research how historical figures look, with contemporary busts and such added together with details in common emphasized. Cleopatra didn't look right compared to her existing portraits.

This shot costs approximately $10! you can now make a $500 million historical drama series from your bedroom. This is Seedance 2.0

@Chopstyx13 @alexboge The setting Sun remains the same size, although atmospheric refraction compresses the disk vertically and increasingly just above the horizon. There is also a well known illusion that the Full moon appears larger near the horizon than overhead. Photos disprove any size change.

@alexboge the one thing you're missing here when you say they claim it goes further away and so should get smaller, right? But the lower in the sky it gets, the bigger it gets. So by their theory it should be getting closer, not going further away. Of course we know why it appears bigger

All you need to ask to debunk flat Earth is this: If the Sun is small, local, and under a dome, and it “sets” simply by moving farther away… Why does it disappear completely while the so-called “lights in the dome” (stars) remain visible? On their model, the Sun is beneath the dome and closer than the stars. It should always appear larger and brighter than those distant pinpoints. As it moves away, it might shrink. It might dim. But it would not vanish. Yet every single day, the Sun drops below a sharp horizon and is gone, while the stars remain. Distance alone does not explain disappearance. Geometry does. And that geometry is spherical.

@DonaldPMitchell @TheMG3D Yes have it emphasize where they agree. Cleopatra has some surviving busts and perhaps a portrait painting. She was not necessarily 'beautiful', but her personal charm apparently made up for it.

@DDAVISSPACEART @TheMG3D I have a book on Roman art that has a page with dozens of pictures of statues of Caesar. I was thinking we could average them together to get a more accurate image of him.

Dude has “film maker” in bio 🤡

@johnricard @isaachorror Caesar was...OK, but he was bald. Cleopatra didn't look like that. I would scan or have good photos, preferably stereo pairs, of all available busts and contemporary portrayals of them and have AI make a composite portrait of them emphasizing where the varied sources agree.

@isaachorror Nope. Caesar would never kneel. Romans were noted for their refusal to submit to expectations. Cleopatra didn’t look like Mia Kunis. May be the future of filmmaking, but it doesn’t mean anyone will watch it or even enjoy it.

I just made a $500 million historical drama series from my bedroom. No crew. No casting calls. No budget. Just AI and a vision. The Future of filmmaking is here. Here is Cleopatra.