Yesterday was the day a machine from earth reached Titan. What a day. Today we could see the first pictures! Many people got very excited about it! Of course, it’s nice the machine got there in one piece and was able to send back some pictures, but I just wonder why no-one seems to question the pictures made on Titan… to me the pictures look like sand with rocks. Found on many locations here on earth… And also, why are the pictures in black and white?!?! I know the machine left earth in 1997, so has been flying for a while, but for sure there where color camera’s in 1997… So why not put one of those on it?!?! Who was the genius that 8 years ago decided to go for a black and white camera?!?! No, color is way to fancy! :-) Or maybe everything on Titan is black and white… that could be the only valid excuse… But then another thing. Yesterday they mentioned on the news they put a music CD in the machine. So if there is any kind of life form out there, they could listen to ….. French music! Yes, French music…. It must have been the same genius that installed the black and white camera… What do we wanne tell people in space? That we on earth have bad taste in music? Or is it to scare the aliens away?? Don’t come to earth, there is more bad music where this came from! ;-)

Update (January 16, 2005):
Ok, the genius wasn’t a total idiot… Found a color image today on the ESA website. But I am not to convinced yet… It says: “This image was returned yesterday, 14 January 2005, by ESA’s Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. This is the coloured view, following processing to add reflection spectra data, gives a better indication of the actual colour of the surface.”
So “coloured view”… Bit weird to call a normal color photo a “coloured view”… so I still think he got told of by his boss for installing a black and white camera, took the black and white picture and went a bit wild with a couple of colors in Photoshop!! :-) I must say the coloured view does make me wonder… if it’s really -180 degrees down there, how come it’s all dusty? I think I would have used the blue filter… ;-)
I have added the pictures so you can judge for yourself! :-)

© ESA.	© ESA.	© By me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 20:09 and is filed under News & media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.