Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / August 2008

On Aug 22, 9:21 am, "Clive" <cl...@selectron-uk.co.uk> wrote:

If a Bloody Mary is tomato juice, vodka, and a dash of Tobasco Sauce,
then a Martian Bloody Mary would be Aojiru, vodka, and a dash of
habanero sauce.

Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA

Add tequila, take out the vodka, put salt and lime juice around
the rim of the glass and have a Martian Bloody Marguerita,
ideal for little green women out on a binge.

 And you claim that hypothetical Martians' Haversian canals would be
how large, and based on what?

 I will for the moment forego discussing the fact that "someone said
on internet" is hardly evidence of anything.

 "Can see a dot as small as" is not the same as "resolve the internal
structure of, so as to unequivocally identify as". In other words,
just because I can see a dot a certain size does not mean that I can
tell whether that dot is part of a complex organic structure like
bone, a complete organism like a rotifer, or simply a dot of toner on
a light background. I'd need to see even smaller details.

 Which is approx 1/5 the diameter of a 120 micron circle, not nearly
enough to show the sort of detail needed to unequivocally identify a
fuzzy blob as an osteon, much less a Haversian canal.

 No. If you blow up a photograph, whether digital or analog, you DO
NOT add more detail than was there originally. "Resolution" means the
SMALLEST object that can be unambiguously identified in the original;
in digital terms, it means a single pixel on the original imaging
device. When translated one-to-one on your monitor each pixel you see
is equal to one on the original, meaning you see what the camera saw
(assuming you make your eye-screen distance such that you can just
resolve one pixel). If you blow up the image so that one pixel covers
your whole monitor, you DO NOT get more detail; it simply wasn't there
in the original for you to get.

 The same applies to old-fashioned film technology; some claim it is
superior to digital imaging technology because film grain size (the
minimum size object a film image can display) is somewhat smaller than
what consumer-grade image digitizers can manage. However film tech is
"mature" meaning it's at the end of its rope, whereas digital tech is
still in its infancy and will soon surpass film tech for good. Still,
the minimum spot size in an image is fixed once the image is taken,
whether printed from a film negative or sent from a digitizer to a
hard drive.

 Also there's the difference between "optical zoom" and so-called
"electronic zoom" in digital camera technology; the latter simply
takes the central part of the light sensor's output and redistributes
it it to fit the output format size meaning say one pixel is spread
out over four, but each of those four is identical to the original one
so there's no extra detail whereas optical zoom moves the lenses so
that each pixel of the detector sees the image of a smaller piece of
the field of view, which DOES give more detail.

 Unfortunately what you describe, "expand the photos 500%", is
essentially electronic zooming which does not give you more detail.
You cannot perform optical zooming on the images available from NASA's
website; you'd need access to the actual camera to do that.

 Correct*; however, as I have explained, such detail IS NOT AVAILABLE
in the images you cite.

* In the context of identifying organic-origin phenomena. However such
structural details are NOT unique to organic structures, they are also
seen in many completely inorganic minerals.

 No, you have not.

 Remember that optical microscopes, whether stereo or "mono" use
moving lenses which give true optical zoom, not the "electronic zoom"
of digital imaging technology.

 Mark L. Fergerson