HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Astronomers/astrophysicists started first, by misrepresenting the process and bringing the talk of taking photos and having "visual evidence".

"...We have seen, and taken a picture, of a Black Hole."

https://youtu.be/lnJi0Jy692w?t=456

⬐ wumpus

Yes? He’s correct.

⬐ belter

There we go again...If you had a photo you not would need to make the merge of the four different images achieved by the four different teams.

Now the you have published the data from 2017, If I publish my own "photo", and I chose blue with spots of white, using the same library you used and the same color maps:

https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORM...

Why yours will be more a picture than mine in blue? Maybe I will even splint a little bit of red in there...

⬐ wumpus

I’m looking forward to reading your scientific paper.

⬐ belter

And I am looking forward to have many other different teams reproduce your results independently.

I also would like to notice you did not explain why my blue "picture" would be less a "picture" than yours.

⬐ aortega

A picture of a black hole would be always artificial, for color don't really exist as it's only the brain interpretation of a part of the EM spectrum heavily averaged, that's why we don't see green stars even if there are many stars whose strongest light is green, like our own sun.

Taking a real picture of a black hole like with a cellphone camera would likely be just like a bright white star.

⬐ wumpus

Enjoy:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022arXiv220510267P/abstra...

The EHT Director during the announcing conference...

"...We have seen, and taken a picture, of a Black Hole."

Video at the correct time: https://youtu.be/lnJi0Jy692w?t=456

Let's not even talk about how it come up with that color, or the fact that in reality there are four different images, corresponding to the different four teams that worked with the same data, and the project then decided to publish only one, "averaged" from the four. ;-)

⬐ wumpus

I'm glad you've read enough to realize how that image was made, but we did publish a lot more than just the one image.

The raw data will be published eventually.

Thanks for being interested in our data.

⬐ belter

Sorry if I upset the team. But I don't think it was ok to let the image being published in the front of all newspapers worldwide, and forgot to mention the color comes from the libraries used to compose the "map". It would be equally scientifically correct if you used a blue color or white, since it was a completely arbitrary choice. I know it defeats from the "picture" story, but just was too much overlooking for my taste. I want to see how "creative" the new release will be.

⬐ wumpus

100% of the details are in the papers.

⬐ _Microft

In my opinion, this makes little sense.

The image processing of any digitally taken picture involves so many corrections that these wouldn't pass such a test of "photograph" either. These either happen by choice of the photographer when developing raw images with tools like darktable, Adobe Lightroom, ... because they want to achieve a certain look - or automatically without interaction in your smartphone/DSLR if one is only interested in getting any picture or video out of the other end (remember how iPhones botched the colored sky during the California wildfires because that's something that wasn't foreseen?).

Even chemically developing images taken on photographic film gives freedom with the results.