MIMIR Telescope/Carrier Animation

[Winter]

The grid effect was an experiment. I guess it didn't go over too well. Here's a try with the grid set to only 10% opacity.
The timer was also originally in realtime. (Useless trivia: the camera orbits the Earth in realtime, too.) I sped it up x3 as you asked.

The camera may orbit in real time, but I find it very hard to believe that a Carrier could make turnover and disappear on the other side of the Earth in a matter of seconds, or even minutes. It would have to be going a good fraction of lightspeed in order to do that, and decelerate at hundreds of Gs so as not to overshoot Earth orbit. Even antimatter engines can't do that without getting backed up by some magitech, which we don't want.

It should probably be sped up by about 10x more.

The grid looks better at this opacity, we can keep it, but I still don't like the big circle around the Carrier in the zoomed-in run. Can you get rid of that? We're already zooming in on the thing and tracking it as it moves, we don't need any more emphasis to draw the eye to the middle of the screen.

Regards,
Winter

[Psawhn]

I figured that the carrier was already heading towards the horizon as soon as it jumped in. After disappearing behind the horizon, it still had a good 30-60 minutes of deceleration time. But there's already the problem that in the wide-angle shot, the carrier's apparent size is simply too large for the craft to actually disappear behind the earth instead of plunging straight into the atmosphere.

...actually, I just realized the best solution might be to make the carrier move parallel to the horizon, instead of heading towards it. That definitely helps solve the problems of apparent size vs. realistic distances. The video can also still be realtime, because relative velocities at orbital speeds emphasize the luck and ranges of the encounter, without making it unrealistic. (It also takes it away from that stupid weird star shape near the horizon)

I can definitely get rid of the big circle, too. Its original intent was just another way to distinguish the zoomed-in shot from the wide-angle shot.

[Psawhn]

Not many changes, actually. The big circle was removed, and I adjusted the times. Now it goes from 02:08 to 03:57. I had to develop a new method of making the numbers (Blender doesn't yet have an easy way of doing things like that), but now I can pretty much pop up any range of numbers, using HH:MM:SS convention quickly, for any length of time, for any range of values.

I thought of adding a date, but Alien Origins aren't researched at any set date.

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/MIMIR_final15_0001_0940.avi

[Winter]

The zoom-in shows up really really blurry for me. Is that intentional? After all, this is a space telescope supposedly capable of photographing distant galaxies, it should be able to provide a clear enough picture between the Earth and Moon.

Regards,
Winter

[Psawhn]

There shouldn't be anything different between this zoom in and the previous ones. The shot's blurry because I had to enlarge the picture to be seen more easily by smaller resolutions - the rendered image itself is enlarged 4x. The camera's zoomed to Blender's max, so I would have to rerender the entire shot at a higher resolution, probably putting my laptop out for a day or two, or move the camera physically closer, which may introduce some awkward movements and further reduce the correlation between the two shots.

I'm trying to maintain a balance between technical realism, astronomical realism, and artistic necessities, and the last one tends not to mix well with the previous two.
Without rerendering anything, the loss in resolution may be explained by the fact that both the lit side of the Earth and the Moon actually are in the picture at all, and in space those things are bright, which would probably need 2080s techonology for the telescope to even operate in those conditions. The filters and settings allowing it to take a shot without the image being hopelessly overexposed might reduce the resolution. Combined with that, this is a wide-angle shot, not a narrow-field shot used to take pictures of galaxies.

Truthfully, I think that if the telescope were looking at the settings needed to view planets and galaxies, I think the carrier would show up only as a very long streak in a single image.

[Sean_E]

There is also the thought that the telescope was not designed to shoot objects so close to itself.
It was designed to focus on stars and objects light years away and that is based off of light waves entering the telescope lens.  Not a literal physical object in such close proximity to itself.

[BTAxis]

How is focusing on an object close to itself NOT based on light waves entering the telescope lens?

[Psawhn]

I was thinking about that, but even though the space telescope can only focus at infinity, objects would still have to be exceedingly close (within several kilometres) before the object would be visibly blurry, I think.

[Sean_E]

Lets put it into context of the human eye.
The eye has the ability to shift its focus very quickly on objects at various distances.  This is what gives us our telescopic vision.
Now, in terms of a space telescope, it is designed for one purpose...to focus on small points of light at an EXTREME distance based on different light wave frequencies. The Hubble Space telescope sees in Infrared, Gamma and UV light frequencies only.  It is only after computer analysis of these images and compositing do we get the full color images we all have known to enjoy viewing.

So, for a space telescope to 'suddenly' focus in on an object that is only a few hundred thousand miles away from it and moving close to MACH 10 in speed, is nearly if not impossible.  Thus blurred images, let alone images that aren't even in a visible light range to the human eye.

[Psawhn]

I know what you're saying, and I think that even to a space telescope, a distance of several hundred km is as good as infinity as far as focusing is concerned.

The part I'm skeptical about is not focusing on the UFO, but the UFO staying in the shot longer than a fraction of a second. Relative velocities even in LEO can reach past 14 kilometres per second (Mach 10, which doesn't apply in space as there's no air or sound in space, is only about 3.4 km/s). At any distance, if the camera can zoom in to visibly see the UFO, the apparent velocity (speed the object moves across the sky) will be too high to see more than a streak in a single frame of video. The camera would have to somehow be rotating at the right speed to track the UFO, then the UFO miraculously jumps in front of the camera.

Actually, maybe the best way to fix this is to not have the tracking camera be a space telescope, but some other, lesser, camera with a wide field of view. Considering the Hubble can see the moon at this level (top image), even my zoomed-in shot is way too wide of an angle to be of any scientific value in a photography mission.

[Winter]

I know what you're saying, and I think that even to a space telescope, a distance of several hundred km is as good as infinity as far as focusing is concerned.

The part I'm skeptical about is not focusing on the UFO, but the UFO staying in the shot longer than a fraction of a second. Relative velocities even in LEO can reach past 14 kilometres per second (Mach 10, which doesn't apply in space as there's no air or sound in space, is only about 3.4 km/s). At any distance, if the camera can zoom in to visibly see the UFO, the apparent velocity (speed the object moves across the sky) will be too high to see more than a streak in a single frame of video. The camera would have to somehow be rotating at the right speed to track the UFO, then the UFO miraculously jumps in front of the camera.

Actually, maybe the best way to fix this is to not have the tracking camera be a space telescope, but some other, lesser, camera with a wide field of view. Considering the Hubble can see the moon at this level (top image), even my zoomed-in shot is way too wide of an angle to be of any scientific value in a photography mission.

Remember that the zooming-in is a digital enhancement of the image, not an actual refocusing of the telescope lens. The telescope itself was part of a program that reconfigured (nearly) all human space monitoring equipment to give as much coverage of the solar system as possible, so it's entirely plausible that the wide-angle setting of the telescope is part of that.

And if you consider how many terabytes of data a telescope in 2084 could store and transmit every day, there's really no restrictions to how much visual data it could absorb.

Regards,
Winter

[Sean_E]

In the end, Psawhn is correct.  Image focusing would be a secondary issue with the shear velocity of the object entering orbit being the first.

[Psawhn]

I had to cheat a bit to increase the resolution. I actually increased the size of the carrier and the moon by four. See if you can spot the visual blooper this causes.

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/MIMIR_final16_0001_0955.avi

[Winter]

To be honest with you, I can't tell. I much prefer this version to the previous one, though!

Regards,
Winter

[Psawhn]

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/MIMIR_final17_0001_0955.avi

I fixed that little blooper, as well as getting rid of some annoying stars in the first shot, and also increasing the bloominess of the jump-flare.

If you have no objections, this will be the final version of the movie.

The visual blooper was the inconsistent location of the UFO relative to the moon at the point it jumped in. (The old video's still up if you want to take a look). In the wide-angle shot, the UFO appeared well to the right of the moon. In the zoomed-in shot, the UFO appeared while in front of the moon. This was because in the zoomed-in shot, the moon (and UFO) were actually physically enlarged, and the moon sort of 'reached out' to grab the UFO .