Quote:
Originally Posted by bojan
Yes, I appreciate your views.. They are valid for you, and for lots of others (that is why I wrote "IMHO" when trying to present my view in the subject.)
However:
1. In amateur world, yes.. but not in scientific community.
2.
3. Standard coordinate grid (RA, DEC) uses North direction UP on the map, and West to the Right.
4. As in point 3. , that is valid for the photos taken from space as well.
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I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what you say, but it feels like its a fairly narrow view on the subject.
1. This is not the scientific community. And i would posit that even the scientific community doesn't always follow NU/WR for camera orientation.
2.
3. This is an arbitrary designation based on our earthbound POV. It's neither right, nor wrong, but it is inherently an earth based POV. Which isn't likely to change until we're a space-faring species.
4. Yes, photos taken in space would still use the RA/DEC coordinate system to locate an object, and use a convention of NU/WR to orient and standardise the language around such. but the orientation of the camera itself with respect to North-up/West Right...EUCLID might observe that because its a survey platform, but the Hubble and JWST certainly don't. a cursory search through the Hubble archives shows that it didn't exclusively orient its camera to the NUWR orientation. and that might just be a product of it imaging at whatever orientation it ended up in once on target.
I do not doubt there is a scientific standard to what is considered up/down/north/west/etc in space, and i'm sure that it's good scientific practise to make sure your images are labelled and presented in that orientation. What I doubt is that the camera orientation must align to that.
If its good enough for Hubble to image at a rotation other than North-up/West-right, then its good enough for me.
But i think this is getting a bit off topic; which is motorized camera rotators. Personally i think they're very useful. They better allows me to artistically capture scientific information and try to present it in a manner that has mass appeal to get people interested in space.
