Oh, the new, perceptual MatplotLib colormaps…..
Here’s one stunning, recent Truecolor image of Pluto from the New Horizons mission:
Original image: The Rich Color Variations of Pluto. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI. Click on the image to view the full feature on New Horizon’s site
Below, I recolored using two of the new colormaps:
Recolored images: I like Viridis, by it is Inferno that really brings to life this image, because of its wider hue and lightness range!
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
Click on the image to watch the original video on NASA’s Visualization Explorer site.
Read the full story on NASA’s Visualization Explorer site.
In my post Our Earth truly is art I talked about Earth as Art, NASA’s e-book collection of wonderful satellite images of our planet, and posted my top 3 picks.
In NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation I talk about a beautiful convergence of maps and art: The Turbulence of Van Gogh and the Labrador Shelf Current, and NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation.
Here’s another gem: Van Gogh from Space Landsat 7 Acquired 7/13/2005, winner of NASA’s public contest to select the Top Five ‘Earth as Art’ Winners
A couple of months ago AGU blogger Dan Satterfield posted a great article titled The Turbulence of Van Gogh and the Labrador Shelf Current.
For getting maps and art together, I thought it could not be topped. Then today, I stumbled into NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation: beautiful!
From the original Source: This is an animation of ocean surface currents from June 2005 to December 2007 from NASA satellites. Watch how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of miles at speeds greater than four miles per hour (six kilometers per hour); how coastal currents like the Agulhas in the Southern Hemisphere move equatorial waters toward Earth’s poles; and how thousands of other ocean currents are confined to particular regions and form slow-moving, circular pools called eddies. Credit: NASA/SVS
More media options, including a 20 minute version at 30 fps can be found here
MIT general circulation model MITgcm
ECCO2: Phase II of MIT/JPL project Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean
I was thrilled this week to learn from Ryan Boller that his team at NASA’s ESDIS Project included MyCarta’s perceptual rainbow (the CubicYF) as one of the palettes for the Worldview satellite imagery browser.
If you’d like to try it, once on the viewer you can load an overlay and then you can choose from among several color palettes. The perceptual rainbow palette is listed here as “Rainbow 2”.
I am including below an example using the Land surface temperature for April 13 2013 from MODIS Aqua mission:
This is really exciting news as NASA’s adoption will increase the palette’s exposure and its chances of becoming more mainstream. This is also as close as I will ever get to realizing my childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. Thanks ESDIS, and thanks Ryan, on both accounts.
NASA has published a number of really good e-books on planetary science. Typically, each time I stumbled on one, I added a link on my Books page, but I could not skip writing about the latest one, which I discovered thanks to this post on FlowingData. It’s called Earth as Art, and it’s a fantastic book!
The pictures in this book are truly marvellous, and a thing of art. Here are my three favourites – I am so mesmerised by them I can’t stop looking (particularly the Ugab River one).
Enjoy. Check the book, and let me know which ones you like.
Von Kármán Vortices, Southern Pacific Ocean
Ugab River, Namibia
Shoemaker Crater, Australia
My top pick is NASA’s new integration of the Apollo Zone Digital data. It was done at Ames Research Centre thanks to a newly developed software system for orbital imagery. The software allows fully automated image mosaicking and terrain modeling of data taken from different positions, with different exposure and resolution, and even selects best image when multiple coverage exists. You can read about this exiting new development in the article Powerful Pixels: Mapping the “Apollo Zone” which has links to the open source software libraries Ames Stereo Pipeline, Neo-Geography Toolkit and NASA Vision Workbench. You can click here to download a kml file for viewing the image mosaic and digital elevation model in Google Earth. I tried it out and it looks great. Check these screen captures below:
