Hey everyone, I’m the astrophotographer, but I’m not OP. I’m assuming OP picked up my article and posted here and that’s ok! So I quickly created an account here to comment.
Having a quick read through the comments I just want to say thank you for the kind words! Please follow my IG (https://www.instagram.com/deepskyjourney) to see more of my photography, and the reddit article if you want to drop a comment with any questions :)
Congratulations Rod. Your pics are amazing! Much success to you.
FWIW, my friend, who is an avid astrophotographer, runs a site Brahmand [1] that captures breathtaking pics of the dark sky, with notes on how he took the pics.
Props to you for your amazing work but my favorite part of your article was:
> And I have to say this clearly: my wife has been incredible through all of it. She’s put up with my astrophotography craziness, backed me the whole way, and seeing how proud and excited she is has been its own kind of reward.
Hi Rod, the images you have on your gallery and instagram are stunning but very low-resolution (unless I'm missing something). You mention in the article about preparing IMAX-ready photographs. Is there a way to download those full-res versions of your images?
> Is there a way to download those full-res versions of your images?
Maybe because HN is usually geared towards "programmers" rather than "artists", but asking for a (free?) download of full-res versions of a photographers photos is a bit like asking a developer who is publishing commercial desktop software for the source code of the program :)
Maybe at least ask to be able to pay for a high resolution version (not just printed), I know I'd be interested in that too!
I'd gladly pay a few bucks for a digital download of a full-res pack. I would love to use these as desktop backgrounds but the images in his gallery are ~1000px on the long end. Even if I buy a print I can't set that as my desktop background.
Maybe the only way is to screenshot the Project Hail Mary credits when it comes to streaming.
> I'd gladly pay a few bucks for a digital download of a full-res pack
It sure sounds like you value his work at less than a dollar per image. The desktop-background market may not be something he's interested in.
> Maybe the only way is to screenshot the Project Hail Mary credits when it comes to streaming.
...and this may be the reason he's not interested in the desktop background market. You make a single sale, and the image is trivially reproduced. Doing it for pennies is not a winning proposition; prints have better margins.
If you want pretty and free nebula pictures, you can have Generative AI make as many as you like - if you want his work: you'll have to abide by his terms.
You're right, I wouldn't pay >$1/image for download.
I understand where he's coming from - even at $100/download others can make reprints and take away print sales, which is presumably where he gets most of his revenue.
I get it. It's just too bad that I won't be able to fully enjoy his body of work without spending $$$ on prints.
He sells prints. Looks like the pricing ranges around $13-172 for paper prints, per image. If your budget is a few dollars for a pack of them, you should look elsewhere.
I was thrilled to read through to the end of the article and discover a fellow Brisbanite! My friends and I were discussing this movie the other night, they will be stoked to keep an eye out for your images.
Anyone in Brisbane (or nearby) with a passing interest in space should really go and checkout the Brisbane Planetarium in the Mt Cootha botanical gardens.
It's a 6 minute uber from Toowong station which is a 9 minute train ride from Central station.
Ive recently bought a remote rural property in a dark sky area with a view to take up astral photography. Ive previously been quite into landscape photography.
Can you recommend any favourite communities or information sources for a newbie to check out?
I’ve had multiple setups over the last 2 years, but for the images displayed in the movie there were two main setups: a William Optics RedCat 51 II and an Askar 130PHQ, both paired with a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera, typically on a Sky Watcher NEQ6 Pro mount, along with narrowband and RGB filters depending on the target.
The Redcat scope FL is 250 mm. The Askar scope FL is 1000 mm. The camera has an APS-C sensor (23.5 mm x 15.7 mm) giving it a crop factor of about 1.5x compared to 35 mm film (where 50mm is considered 1:1 human vision field of view).
So:
Redcat: 250 / 50 * 1.5 =7.5x magnification
Askar : 1000 / 50 * 1.5 =30x magnification
This is deep sky photography. Doesn't require lots of magnification. What it does require is dark skies and lots of exposure time.
I wish he had more info on his site about his capture process, but it sounds like some of his captures are over multiple nights? I'm not entirely clear on the terminology here:
I may be wrong with all of this. I haven't done any astrophotography since I was a teen and that was just a 50 mm Nikon SLR on the back of a Celestron 8" CST with motorized manual tracking from highly suboptimal skies (Miami, FL). Still, got some decent shots of the Orion nebula.
hey! congratulations!!
I've been quite unknowingly used your pictures as my desktop wallpaper for years now. don't really remember how I found them, but your clicks are what greet me everytime I turn it on.
Also a fellow astrophotography enthusiast here! I love to photograph deep sky objects in the context of their landscapes. There is a lot of math, stacking, tracking, and denoising in the process, but I keep every image very real as what you would see if your eyes were a lot more sensitive. A lot of people don't realize how big some objects are in the night sky -- for example, Barnard's Loop is as large as about half the entire constellation of Orion, and Andromeda appears 6 times the size of the moon. We just don't see them because many of these objects are very dim -- not small.
This is incredible and wonderful news, huge congratulations! As someone who works at the intersection of design and engineering, the detail about delivering "starless versions" so the credit typography doesn't compete with the bright stars is exactly the kind of invisible technical problem-solving I love reading about on here.
On a personal note, I find it very refreshing to hear that a major studio opted for real captured photography. Love that they specifically wanted the authenticity of real narrowband data and that speaks to the production team's vision. Enjoy the premiere night, feel incredibly proud. I was already planning on watching the movie this weekend (it releases here on the 26th) and now I'm doubly excited because I know this neat little tidbit.
I'm pretty sure this "Dad did something crazy" moment is going to be a core memory for your kids. Congrats!
I'm curious how the starless versions are created. From the steps at the end, I couldn't see a 'this is how stars are removed' step. Maybe it's part of stacking (but most stars would remain present?) or the calibration process treating stars as noise?
Traditionally (pre-ai) you would use another image of the same part of the sky and negate the items that you want to remove from the image
As an example terrestrial telescope mirrors get dusty. You're not going to break down the scope just to clean up the dust as this is a many days operation in most cases. So instead you would take "flats" that were of a pure white background and thus showed the dust in its full, dusty, glory. When you take your actual images, you negate (subtract from the original image) the flat and thus any noise generated by the dust. You can use this same method for removing brighter stars from an image that would otherwise saturate the ccd and wash out the background. Turns out it doesn't work for planes. Ask me how I know!
> Traditionally (pre-ai) you would use another image of the same part of the sky and negate the items that you want to remove from the image.
I'm not an astrophotographer, so I'm interested about why that method would work for stars. Are not stars fixed in relation to the images taken? I could see how the technique would work with planets, maybe, but not stars.
Why does the technique not work with aircraft? Because they generally fly on fixed routes?
As the Earth rotates over the course of the night, the background stars and nebulae move as a single unit, no?
Maybe for some close stars parallax might work to remove them over the course of half a year. But no way could the Earth's rotation during a single night move background stars out of a nebulae.
Sure, but the nebulae also move along with the stars. The questions is how one can subtract the stars without also subtracting the nebulae. (I'm assuming different filters and/or a database of known star positions)
The ESA catalog is not precise enough to remove a star from an image of the structure of a nebulae - never mind Hipparcos. Filters while photographing and image processing in post are the way to go.
Don't forget that not only does the star need to be removed, but also the diffraction spikes. Those are internal reflections in the lens assembly - not mapped by any star catalog ))
So this part of the blog post is essentially false: "no generative AI of any kind"
I have yet to see a precise technical definition of what "generative AI" means, but StarXTerminator uses a neural network that generates new data to fill in the gaps where non-stellar objects are obscured by stars. And it advertises itself as "AI powered".
I don't consider photos I take on iPhone to be "AI generated" or even "AI augmented" even though iPhone uses neural networks and "AI" to do basic stuff like low light photography, blurring backgrounds, etc.
I agree that I wouldn't call these photos "AI generated", because the majority of what you're seeing is real.
But that's very different to saying that no generative AI was used at all in their production. "AI augmented" sounds pretty accurate to me.
Likewise, if someone posted a photo taken with their iPhone where they had used the built-in AI features to (for instance) remove people or objects, and then they claimed that no AI was involved, I would consider that misleading, even if the photo accurately depicts a real scene in other respects.
As a photographer and machine learning guy, I would call a lot of modern phone photos AI augmented. AI to stack photos or figure out what counts as the background is a little bit of a gray area, but an img-to-img CNN is about as close as you can get to full AI generation without a full GAN or diffusion model.
“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”
> So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...
I disagree. If there are many flies around a statue, and I photograph the statue but remove the flies in the photo (via AI or any other technique), then I'm still producing an image of something that exists in the world - exactly as it appears in the world.
I agree that the claim "no generative AI used" is technically incorrect, but I do feel that the image does not contain any AI-hallucinated content and therefore is an accurate representation of reality. These structures appear in the image exactly as they exist in nature.
AI-related definitions aside, if it's a strictly subtractive/destructive tool that only removes light, it's hard to characterise as "generative" and arguably not much different to filtering frequencies!
It's not just "removing light", because if you removed all the light from stars, you would be left with black spots instead of white spots. The stars are bright enough to completely saturate a region of the image sensor. So there was actually no data recorded about what was in that particular part of the nebula or whatever.
The "generative" part is that the algorithm is filling in a plausible guess as to what would have been observed if there was no star "in the way".
I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
Bright stars are so bright they literally mask areas of the sky. You'll probably need deconvolution algorithms (CLEAN being the standard some time ago, don't know whether some AI/deep-inv approach works nowadays...) to remove them.
There are several “AI” deconvolution tools to remove stars which work exceptionally well: two of the most popular ones being StarNet and RC-Astro’s StarXTerminator. I’m willing to bet that the author used the latter for star removal as it’s become something of a standard in the astrophotography world.
Somewhat related, nature photographer/youtuber Danni Connor had her recording of a red squirrel used in the movie Dune (Part 1) for the sound of the desert mouse (muad'dib). Her interviewing with (Oscar-winning) sound designer Mark Mangini on it:
Incredible work, OP. What a proud feeling you must have. Congrats!!
My wife and I saw the movie this weekend, we thought it was great. I adored the book, yet I recognize a book can’t be perfectly translated to the screen.
I thought the directors did a good enough job at translating the sci-fi into something the masses would enjoy.
Haven’t seen the movie yet, but the book is definitely one of my all time favourites, so I would recommend reading it regardless of the movie.
The way the book is structured there is only one big reveal that would be spoiled by the movie, but I don’t think that was the most interesting thing in the book anyways, it was all about engineering, the scientific method and all that, and I think that will still hold before or after watching.
The one big exception I’ve found to “read the book first” advice to me has been “the expanse” there the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other, and the advice there is “definitely do both”. I was reading the books and watching the series in parallel - side by side.
As a general rule, always read the book first. In this case, that holds true - there was too much in the book to cover completely in the movie. It's a pretty quick read as well - you could probably bang it out in a long afternoon, if you were inclined.
That said, I never read Harry Potter and can't imagine going back and reading it now. So, YMMV.
I don’t think it does here. This has been one of the times where I enjoyed the movie more than the book. I liked the character in the book, in the movie I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
They might be a special case considering the audience, books, author, actors, and the movies themselves grew alongside each other; it’s pretty singular, I think.
Both are wonderful. I thought the movie was an excellent adaptation of the book.
But I am glad I read the book first, I got much more out of it - it goes a lot more in depth into the science and engineering challenges that occur throughout. Which I appreciated. I'm not sure I would have read the book in the same way if I had seen the movie first.
I tend to prefer movies as a storytelling medium, and enjoyed watching the story unfold that way. I ended up just wanting to know more about things that were implied in the movie but not explained, and the book filled in those gaps well.
So if you want to do both, and want to get something new when you do each, then, having done it that way, I would recommend it.
Edit: reviewing my app history, it took me somewhere between 10-11 hours to read the book, and I do not read fiction especially fast.
I often feel similarly to this when it comes to anime vs manga. I've explained it to people as the anime with its voice acting, music, motion, and color being able to present a better version of the story. You hit the nail on the head with reading the book after to fill in blanks as well. I like to say the manga often has bonus details, but if I'd read it first, it would spoil the anime, similarly to reading a movie script before watching a movie. Basically no one agrees with me on any of this so I was surprised to see your take being similar to mine.
That’s a tough one. I’d recommend the book first, but I can see arguments for both orders.
By reading the book first, you’ll have a better background and understanding of the context of the plot, the science, and the overall objectives of the mission. There are also several “twists” in the book that were cut from the movie for runtime.
I enjoyed the movie after reading because I got to see the story “come to life”.
But I could also understand the perspective of enjoying the movie first, and then having the story/world expanded 8x with a 16hr book.
You’d could equate “movie -> book” order to watching the LoTR standard editions first, and then watching the extended editions.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ray Porter (on Audible) and would recommend that production if you enjoy audio.
I found that I would have enjoyed the movie a bit more if I hadn't read the book, but it was still a solid 8/10. I'm really glad that a movie like this did well in opening weekend.
Not the parent, but I've seen the movie and read the book. I think there are a few gaps in the movie that's explained by the book, but there are some artistic freedom as well between the book and the film.
I would recommend reading the book first at least.
The book is fantastic, I’d recommend reading it one way or another. ;) Speaking personally, I lose some motivation to read a book after seeing the movie. But book-based movies of course rarely if ever live up to the book. I read first, so I can’t speak to the other way around, but I think I was looking forward to the movie a lot more than I would have if I hadn’t read the book. I also suspect I was more forgiving of the movie than if I’d seen it cold.
Amazing! Kudos to Hollywood, for going to this length to license the work, credit the author, involve him in the project. To respect realism as a goal for its own, even though "no one will notice" and a similar image might be "just a prompt away." I know how common is the latter these days.
This just warms my heart and gives me hope. First aside from the fact this book got me back into reading, and the movie is one of the better book to film adaptations I've seen, and I'm so happy it gets good box office and justified word of mouth. It shows me another thing - there is demand for human generated content. It's not a big revelation, people prefer to pay a little extra for handmade although they might not really know the difference, they do it because it feels right, to support a local business, or not local, when traveling, I want to support their local business, not some conglomerate that bid the lowest and underpays their workers (until replaced by robots).
This gives me hope because as we move to a post AGI world, the only thing preventing a complete dystopia is supply and demand, if the demand for human generated work will stay and grow, we'll be ok. This is not some save the earth, be vegan, "AI is bad" message. If you follow me you know I'm all in on agentic development and try to use AI for everything I can that makes sense, but I do it to free my time to focus on the important things.
If more companies will go for the real thing, and more people like us will celebrate them for it, and vote for it with their pockets, then AI will serve humanity, and not vice versa.
p.s. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, then read the book, then see the movie, I'm going to watch it twice, and re-read the book. Yes, it's not Dune, or Hyperion, or Children of Time, or The Left Hand of Darkness, but it's such an amazing storytelling journey that made me go back reading after a 15 years hiatus.
About to see the movie in two days, read the book ages ago and remember I wasn't too fond of the book ending either, so now I got a bit more excited :)
As more an more companies lazily use AI to achieve the same thing I am doubling down on supporting -- even if I don't really care about the subject -- anything that supports actual, real human art.
I was curious about this too and looked up the approximate online selling prices for new.
The camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro ~$2000 and telescopes: Askar 130PHQ Quadruplet Refracting Astrograph ~$3500 and William Optics WIFD Ultra-Cat 76 APO Refractor ~$2200. Mount: Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro ~$1300. Probably also some specialized tripod, adapters, software and lots of time and care. Remarkable results for essentially 'serious hobbyist' money.
Amazing achievement, congratulations! Can't seem to be able to read it though, it greets me with "Sorry, you have been blocked" CloudFlare page — is this a HN overloading the website, or did the host accidentally block IPs from Ukraine perhaps?
As an amateur astrophotographer, I am both so envious and so happy for you. What a wonderful recognition of your talent and dedication to the craft. Kudos!
The stars were stripped out with neural network tools (StarNet++/StarXTerminator) at the studio request so text credits would read cleanly over them. The underlying nebula data is real, but removing every star from the field puts this firmly in the category of art photography, not scientific imaging.
No one has ever or could ever observe a nebula with zero stars in the frame.
Those shots are stunning. Too bad I rarely pay attention to the credits. I always assumed a lot of effort goes into them though, and this post seems to confirm it.
That is not what starnet does. It just removes the star from the picture you took, nothing else. It also predates generative AI by a few years.
If by "not real", you mean "you removed the stars so it no longer reflect reality!", then real photograph doesn't exist. For example, OP uses narrow-band filters, and it's common to map H-alpha wavelength, which is red, to green in the images. Does that make it unreal?
In the end, astrophotography is more art than science; the goal is more about producing aesthetically-pleasing images than doing photometry. Photographers must take some artistic license.
“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”
Your citation is a valid copy-paste from the website linked, but you haven't yet replied to the assertions of the parent comment. Could you, in your own words rather than someone else's, speak more about your concerns and address those assertions?
They're a lot more real than CG/AI. It's very rare and maybe not even possible to have a "true" astrophotography photo.
At those light levels, eyes and camera sensors work very differently and even a "plain" astro photo has either been processed a lot, or else doesn't look like what our eyes would see.
Even straight-out-of-the-camera JPG files have been heavily processed - they are just hidden behind the RAW processor which we have taken for granted; not to mention smartphone photographs, which employ neural network in the processing pipeline.
Everyone do yourselves a favor and skip all trailers and go see this movie. It was a delight start to finish. I was so glad I knew zero what the story was.
Why? I am currently reading the book as well, and I even though I am not a scientist I feel like I am finding small technical/scientific mistakes that shouldn't have had to be there.
Hey everyone, I’m the astrophotographer, but I’m not OP. I’m assuming OP picked up my article and posted here and that’s ok! So I quickly created an account here to comment.
Having a quick read through the comments I just want to say thank you for the kind words! Please follow my IG (https://www.instagram.com/deepskyjourney) to see more of my photography, and the reddit article if you want to drop a comment with any questions :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/s/NbRv3sj3fs
Cheers,
Rod Prazeres
Congratulations Rod. Your pics are amazing! Much success to you.
FWIW, my friend, who is an avid astrophotographer, runs a site Brahmand [1] that captures breathtaking pics of the dark sky, with notes on how he took the pics.
Awesome stuff: https://www.brahmand.me/photo-gallery/
Recommended for anyone interested in astrophotography.
*Brahmand in Sanskrit means the universe
[1] https://www.brahmand.me/
Wow. Stunning photos. Thanks.
Props to you for your amazing work but my favorite part of your article was:
> And I have to say this clearly: my wife has been incredible through all of it. She’s put up with my astrophotography craziness, backed me the whole way, and seeing how proud and excited she is has been its own kind of reward.
Hi Rod, the images you have on your gallery and instagram are stunning but very low-resolution (unless I'm missing something). You mention in the article about preparing IMAX-ready photographs. Is there a way to download those full-res versions of your images?
> Is there a way to download those full-res versions of your images?
Maybe because HN is usually geared towards "programmers" rather than "artists", but asking for a (free?) download of full-res versions of a photographers photos is a bit like asking a developer who is publishing commercial desktop software for the source code of the program :)
Maybe at least ask to be able to pay for a high resolution version (not just printed), I know I'd be interested in that too!
I'd gladly pay a few bucks for a digital download of a full-res pack. I would love to use these as desktop backgrounds but the images in his gallery are ~1000px on the long end. Even if I buy a print I can't set that as my desktop background.
Maybe the only way is to screenshot the Project Hail Mary credits when it comes to streaming.
> I'd gladly pay a few bucks for a digital download of a full-res pack
It sure sounds like you value his work at less than a dollar per image. The desktop-background market may not be something he's interested in.
> Maybe the only way is to screenshot the Project Hail Mary credits when it comes to streaming.
...and this may be the reason he's not interested in the desktop background market. You make a single sale, and the image is trivially reproduced. Doing it for pennies is not a winning proposition; prints have better margins.
If you want pretty and free nebula pictures, you can have Generative AI make as many as you like - if you want his work: you'll have to abide by his terms.
You're right, I wouldn't pay >$1/image for download.
I understand where he's coming from - even at $100/download others can make reprints and take away print sales, which is presumably where he gets most of his revenue.
I get it. It's just too bad that I won't be able to fully enjoy his body of work without spending $$$ on prints.
He sells prints. Looks like the pricing ranges around $13-172 for paper prints, per image. If your budget is a few dollars for a pack of them, you should look elsewhere.
I assume that is on purpose, you have to buy prints. Curious if the full res digital would be for sale but I am guessing not
I was thrilled to read through to the end of the article and discover a fellow Brisbanite! My friends and I were discussing this movie the other night, they will be stoked to keep an eye out for your images.
Anyone in Brisbane (or nearby) with a passing interest in space should really go and checkout the Brisbane Planetarium in the Mt Cootha botanical gardens.
It's a 6 minute uber from Toowong station which is a 9 minute train ride from Central station.
You have to book, but it's definitely worth it!
The Director of Photography on the movie is also an Australian!
Did you sell the rights the image exclusively or will you be able to sell those images as prints?
Jazz hands
They’re non exclusive and you can find them up for sale here: https://rpastro.darkroom.com/collections/as-seen-in-project-...
My website is also www.rpastro.com.au :)
Amaze! Amaze!
Congrats on having your images picked up!
Ive recently bought a remote rural property in a dark sky area with a view to take up astral photography. Ive previously been quite into landscape photography.
Can you recommend any favourite communities or information sources for a newbie to check out?
Hey Rod, your last name seems portuguese(?)
Congrats on this, not only you got credits on a feature movie, you got one of the good ones. Cloud 9 for you, enjoy!
Nice catch. I’m Brazilian but have been living in Australia for over 20 years and thank you!
Hey! Great work, really glad to see a Brazilian fella doing such an amazing work.
Greetings from Minas Gerais
Very cool. Major bragging rights. And it is a great film to be associated with.
Can you share what equipment was used to capture those images?
I’ve had multiple setups over the last 2 years, but for the images displayed in the movie there were two main setups: a William Optics RedCat 51 II and an Askar 130PHQ, both paired with a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera, typically on a Sky Watcher NEQ6 Pro mount, along with narrowband and RGB filters depending on the target.
What sort of magnification do you need to get photos like that?
The Redcat scope FL is 250 mm. The Askar scope FL is 1000 mm. The camera has an APS-C sensor (23.5 mm x 15.7 mm) giving it a crop factor of about 1.5x compared to 35 mm film (where 50mm is considered 1:1 human vision field of view).
So:
Redcat: 250 / 50 * 1.5 =7.5x magnification
Askar : 1000 / 50 * 1.5 =30x magnification
This is deep sky photography. Doesn't require lots of magnification. What it does require is dark skies and lots of exposure time.
I wish he had more info on his site about his capture process, but it sounds like some of his captures are over multiple nights? I'm not entirely clear on the terminology here:
Integration: 17h 50′
Hα: 30×600″ (5h)
OIII: 31×600″ (5h 10′)
SII: 37×600″ (6h 10′)
RGB Stars: 30×60″ each channel (1h 30′ total)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DToHq5sk_6r/?img_index=1
I may be wrong with all of this. I haven't done any astrophotography since I was a teen and that was just a 50 mm Nikon SLR on the back of a Celestron 8" CST with motorized manual tracking from highly suboptimal skies (Miami, FL). Still, got some decent shots of the Orion nebula.
Thanks for the info.
Somewhat answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520283
Congratulations :-)
Very nice shots. It must be a great feeling to see one's own footage in a feature film!
How long do you do astrophotography?
hey! congratulations!! I've been quite unknowingly used your pictures as my desktop wallpaper for years now. don't really remember how I found them, but your clicks are what greet me everytime I turn it on.
First time in ages I sat through the credits!
Also a fellow astrophotography enthusiast here! I love to photograph deep sky objects in the context of their landscapes. There is a lot of math, stacking, tracking, and denoising in the process, but I keep every image very real as what you would see if your eyes were a lot more sensitive. A lot of people don't realize how big some objects are in the night sky -- for example, Barnard's Loop is as large as about half the entire constellation of Orion, and Andromeda appears 6 times the size of the moon. We just don't see them because many of these objects are very dim -- not small.
https://www.instagram.com/dheeranet
They are beautiful!
This is incredible and wonderful news, huge congratulations! As someone who works at the intersection of design and engineering, the detail about delivering "starless versions" so the credit typography doesn't compete with the bright stars is exactly the kind of invisible technical problem-solving I love reading about on here.
On a personal note, I find it very refreshing to hear that a major studio opted for real captured photography. Love that they specifically wanted the authenticity of real narrowband data and that speaks to the production team's vision. Enjoy the premiere night, feel incredibly proud. I was already planning on watching the movie this weekend (it releases here on the 26th) and now I'm doubly excited because I know this neat little tidbit.
I'm pretty sure this "Dad did something crazy" moment is going to be a core memory for your kids. Congrats!
I'm curious how the starless versions are created. From the steps at the end, I couldn't see a 'this is how stars are removed' step. Maybe it's part of stacking (but most stars would remain present?) or the calibration process treating stars as noise?
Traditionally (pre-ai) you would use another image of the same part of the sky and negate the items that you want to remove from the image
As an example terrestrial telescope mirrors get dusty. You're not going to break down the scope just to clean up the dust as this is a many days operation in most cases. So instead you would take "flats" that were of a pure white background and thus showed the dust in its full, dusty, glory. When you take your actual images, you negate (subtract from the original image) the flat and thus any noise generated by the dust. You can use this same method for removing brighter stars from an image that would otherwise saturate the ccd and wash out the background. Turns out it doesn't work for planes. Ask me how I know!
Why does the technique not work with aircraft? Because they generally fly on fixed routes?
Earth moves - that's how you get the next shot without repositioning the telescope.
This time-lapse probably better visualizes it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ
As the Earth rotates over the course of the night, the background stars and nebulae move as a single unit, no?
Maybe for some close stars parallax might work to remove them over the course of half a year. But no way could the Earth's rotation during a single night move background stars out of a nebulae.
Sure, but the nebulae also move along with the stars. The questions is how one can subtract the stars without also subtracting the nebulae. (I'm assuming different filters and/or a database of known star positions)
The ESA catalog is not precise enough to remove a star from an image of the structure of a nebulae - never mind Hipparcos. Filters while photographing and image processing in post are the way to go.
Don't forget that not only does the star need to be removed, but also the diffraction spikes. Those are internal reflections in the lens assembly - not mapped by any star catalog ))
Makes sense, thanks!
>> I'm curious how the starless versions are created.
Its done with using dedicated astrophotography software (StarXTerminator). Example: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/
So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...
Rod Prazeres the Astrophotographer, has given this interview where he talks about the process: https://www.astronomy.com/observing/the-astrophotography-of-...
So this part of the blog post is essentially false: "no generative AI of any kind"
I have yet to see a precise technical definition of what "generative AI" means, but StarXTerminator uses a neural network that generates new data to fill in the gaps where non-stellar objects are obscured by stars. And it advertises itself as "AI powered".
I don't consider photos I take on iPhone to be "AI generated" or even "AI augmented" even though iPhone uses neural networks and "AI" to do basic stuff like low light photography, blurring backgrounds, etc.
I agree that I wouldn't call these photos "AI generated", because the majority of what you're seeing is real.
But that's very different to saying that no generative AI was used at all in their production. "AI augmented" sounds pretty accurate to me.
Likewise, if someone posted a photo taken with their iPhone where they had used the built-in AI features to (for instance) remove people or objects, and then they claimed that no AI was involved, I would consider that misleading, even if the photo accurately depicts a real scene in other respects.
As a photographer and machine learning guy, I would call a lot of modern phone photos AI augmented. AI to stack photos or figure out what counts as the background is a little bit of a gray area, but an img-to-img CNN is about as close as you can get to full AI generation without a full GAN or diffusion model.
So funny people are downvoting you...
https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/
“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”
I agree that the claim "no generative AI used" is technically incorrect, but I do feel that the image does not contain any AI-hallucinated content and therefore is an accurate representation of reality. These structures appear in the image exactly as they exist in nature.
AI-related definitions aside, if it's a strictly subtractive/destructive tool that only removes light, it's hard to characterise as "generative" and arguably not much different to filtering frequencies!
It's not just "removing light", because if you removed all the light from stars, you would be left with black spots instead of white spots. The stars are bright enough to completely saturate a region of the image sensor. So there was actually no data recorded about what was in that particular part of the nebula or whatever.
The "generative" part is that the algorithm is filling in a plausible guess as to what would have been observed if there was no star "in the way".
I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
Bright stars are so bright they literally mask areas of the sky. You'll probably need deconvolution algorithms (CLEAN being the standard some time ago, don't know whether some AI/deep-inv approach works nowadays...) to remove them.
There are several “AI” deconvolution tools to remove stars which work exceptionally well: two of the most popular ones being StarNet and RC-Astro’s StarXTerminator. I’m willing to bet that the author used the latter for star removal as it’s become something of a standard in the astrophotography world.
Somewhat related, nature photographer/youtuber Danni Connor had her recording of a red squirrel used in the movie Dune (Part 1) for the sound of the desert mouse (muad'dib). Her interviewing with (Oscar-winning) sound designer Mark Mangini on it:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtfzjehDg74
* transcript: https://otter.ai/u/PA9dbWFA7BgPgLZN9CSo1WFAjXk
* https://www.iflscience.com/wildlife-photographers-viral-squi...
* https://markmangini.com/Mark_Mangini/Blog/Entries/2021/11/7_...
Story of her 'adopting' the squirrels:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDlh62AVPo
The name of the squirrel is "Baby Pear"; her viral tweet:
* https://twitter.com/DaniConnorWild/status/127534941750838476...
Incredible work, OP. What a proud feeling you must have. Congrats!!
My wife and I saw the movie this weekend, we thought it was great. I adored the book, yet I recognize a book can’t be perfectly translated to the screen.
I thought the directors did a good enough job at translating the sci-fi into something the masses would enjoy.
Kudos to you
Would you recommend reading the book first?
Haven’t seen the movie yet, but the book is definitely one of my all time favourites, so I would recommend reading it regardless of the movie.
The way the book is structured there is only one big reveal that would be spoiled by the movie, but I don’t think that was the most interesting thing in the book anyways, it was all about engineering, the scientific method and all that, and I think that will still hold before or after watching.
The one big exception I’ve found to “read the book first” advice to me has been “the expanse” there the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other, and the advice there is “definitely do both”. I was reading the books and watching the series in parallel - side by side.
I do hope Hail Marry is like that…
As a general rule, always read the book first. In this case, that holds true - there was too much in the book to cover completely in the movie. It's a pretty quick read as well - you could probably bang it out in a long afternoon, if you were inclined.
That said, I never read Harry Potter and can't imagine going back and reading it now. So, YMMV.
I don’t think it does here. This has been one of the times where I enjoyed the movie more than the book. I liked the character in the book, in the movie I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
I watched the Harry Potter movies first and then read the books and thoroughly enjoyed the books, and the movies didn't spoil them at all.
They might be a special case considering the audience, books, author, actors, and the movies themselves grew alongside each other; it’s pretty singular, I think.
Both are wonderful. I thought the movie was an excellent adaptation of the book.
But I am glad I read the book first, I got much more out of it - it goes a lot more in depth into the science and engineering challenges that occur throughout. Which I appreciated. I'm not sure I would have read the book in the same way if I had seen the movie first.
I watched the movie and then read the book.
I tend to prefer movies as a storytelling medium, and enjoyed watching the story unfold that way. I ended up just wanting to know more about things that were implied in the movie but not explained, and the book filled in those gaps well.
So if you want to do both, and want to get something new when you do each, then, having done it that way, I would recommend it.
Edit: reviewing my app history, it took me somewhere between 10-11 hours to read the book, and I do not read fiction especially fast.
I often feel similarly to this when it comes to anime vs manga. I've explained it to people as the anime with its voice acting, music, motion, and color being able to present a better version of the story. You hit the nail on the head with reading the book after to fill in blanks as well. I like to say the manga often has bonus details, but if I'd read it first, it would spoil the anime, similarly to reading a movie script before watching a movie. Basically no one agrees with me on any of this so I was surprised to see your take being similar to mine.
I read the book before watching the movie - I'd recommend the opposite.
Watching the movie first will set the stage for a lot of details that work better in a book than a movie.
That’s a tough one. I’d recommend the book first, but I can see arguments for both orders.
By reading the book first, you’ll have a better background and understanding of the context of the plot, the science, and the overall objectives of the mission. There are also several “twists” in the book that were cut from the movie for runtime.
I enjoyed the movie after reading because I got to see the story “come to life”.
But I could also understand the perspective of enjoying the movie first, and then having the story/world expanded 8x with a 16hr book.
You’d could equate “movie -> book” order to watching the LoTR standard editions first, and then watching the extended editions.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ray Porter (on Audible) and would recommend that production if you enjoy audio.
I don’t think you can go wrong either way :)
Audiobook is outstanding with sound fx, if one is into that.
Book is better but they’re both good. I don’t think order matters.
I agree; the movie is more of a relationship/self-reflection/friendship story, with some pop science and space stuff mixed in to keep it interesting.
The book is more of a true sci-fi novel, with the relationship stuff keeping it interesting.
I liked both a lot, and think both could be enjoyed fully with or without the other, in either order.
I found that I would have enjoyed the movie a bit more if I hadn't read the book, but it was still a solid 8/10. I'm really glad that a movie like this did well in opening weekend.
Not the parent, but I've seen the movie and read the book. I think there are a few gaps in the movie that's explained by the book, but there are some artistic freedom as well between the book and the film.
I would recommend reading the book first at least.
The book is fantastic, I’d recommend reading it one way or another. ;) Speaking personally, I lose some motivation to read a book after seeing the movie. But book-based movies of course rarely if ever live up to the book. I read first, so I can’t speak to the other way around, but I think I was looking forward to the movie a lot more than I would have if I hadn’t read the book. I also suspect I was more forgiving of the movie than if I’d seen it cold.
The audiobook version is amazing, if that’s your thing.
> Would you recommend reading the book first?
I recommended it to a co-worker, who ended up going with the audio book, and found he found it good.
Amazing! Kudos to Hollywood, for going to this length to license the work, credit the author, involve him in the project. To respect realism as a goal for its own, even though "no one will notice" and a similar image might be "just a prompt away." I know how common is the latter these days.
I doubt that good looking IMAX quality astrophotography is just a prompt away.
This just warms my heart and gives me hope. First aside from the fact this book got me back into reading, and the movie is one of the better book to film adaptations I've seen, and I'm so happy it gets good box office and justified word of mouth. It shows me another thing - there is demand for human generated content. It's not a big revelation, people prefer to pay a little extra for handmade although they might not really know the difference, they do it because it feels right, to support a local business, or not local, when traveling, I want to support their local business, not some conglomerate that bid the lowest and underpays their workers (until replaced by robots).
This gives me hope because as we move to a post AGI world, the only thing preventing a complete dystopia is supply and demand, if the demand for human generated work will stay and grow, we'll be ok. This is not some save the earth, be vegan, "AI is bad" message. If you follow me you know I'm all in on agentic development and try to use AI for everything I can that makes sense, but I do it to free my time to focus on the important things.
If more companies will go for the real thing, and more people like us will celebrate them for it, and vote for it with their pockets, then AI will serve humanity, and not vice versa.
p.s. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, then read the book, then see the movie, I'm going to watch it twice, and re-read the book. Yes, it's not Dune, or Hyperion, or Children of Time, or The Left Hand of Darkness, but it's such an amazing storytelling journey that made me go back reading after a 15 years hiatus.
Me and my brother just saw the movie tonight and we stayed for the credits. I thought the images were beautiful.
I loved that they changed the ending. I did not like the ending in the book.
About to see the movie in two days, read the book ages ago and remember I wasn't too fond of the book ending either, so now I got a bit more excited :)
I don't think they changed much about the ending. There's one scene added that's not in the book, but the outcomes are all the same.
What changed about the ending?
No spoilers please, not everyone has seen the movie!
That’s what rot13 is for.
This reminds me of the photo of the vehicle assembly building featured in Iron Man: https://adactio.com/journal/1530/
As more an more companies lazily use AI to achieve the same thing I am doubling down on supporting -- even if I don't really care about the subject -- anything that supports actual, real human art.
That's really great news. For anyone looking for the astrophotography equipment, this is from one of his posts:
Telescope: William Optics UltraCat 76 Mount: Sky-Watcher Wave 150i Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro
I was curious about this too and looked up the approximate online selling prices for new.
The camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro ~$2000 and telescopes: Askar 130PHQ Quadruplet Refracting Astrograph ~$3500 and William Optics WIFD Ultra-Cat 76 APO Refractor ~$2200. Mount: Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro ~$1300. Probably also some specialized tripod, adapters, software and lots of time and care. Remarkable results for essentially 'serious hobbyist' money.
A bit indiscrete, but how much does the licence cost? Is it around hundreds, 1k, 10k?
5k
Amazing achievement, congratulations! Can't seem to be able to read it though, it greets me with "Sorry, you have been blocked" CloudFlare page — is this a HN overloading the website, or did the host accidentally block IPs from Ukraine perhaps?
As an amateur astrophotographer, I am both so envious and so happy for you. What a wonderful recognition of your talent and dedication to the craft. Kudos!
I was wondering what these images were! I wasn't sure if they were real photographs or not. They're great!
The stars were stripped out with neural network tools (StarNet++/StarXTerminator) at the studio request so text credits would read cleanly over them. The underlying nebula data is real, but removing every star from the field puts this firmly in the category of art photography, not scientific imaging.
No one has ever or could ever observe a nebula with zero stars in the frame.
Congrats man! That's an awesome accomplishment!
Amazing movie and the end credit visuals WERE incredible!
This is kind of in line with the story, where amateur astronomers data from around the world is used to test a hypothesis.
I am currently reading the book.
Those shots are stunning. Too bad I rarely pay attention to the credits. I always assumed a lot of effort goes into them though, and this post seems to confirm it.
Dude, amazing! The images are beautiful and it's 1000 times better when you know they're real and not CGI/AI.
They are not real ... https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/
That is not what starnet does. It just removes the star from the picture you took, nothing else. It also predates generative AI by a few years.
If by "not real", you mean "you removed the stars so it no longer reflect reality!", then real photograph doesn't exist. For example, OP uses narrow-band filters, and it's common to map H-alpha wavelength, which is red, to green in the images. Does that make it unreal?
In the end, astrophotography is more art than science; the goal is more about producing aesthetically-pleasing images than doing photometry. Photographers must take some artistic license.
https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/
“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”
Your citation is a valid copy-paste from the website linked, but you haven't yet replied to the assertions of the parent comment. Could you, in your own words rather than someone else's, speak more about your concerns and address those assertions?
They're a lot more real than CG/AI. It's very rare and maybe not even possible to have a "true" astrophotography photo. At those light levels, eyes and camera sensors work very differently and even a "plain" astro photo has either been processed a lot, or else doesn't look like what our eyes would see.
>> They're a lot more real than CG/AI.
Fine, but is still art photography with heavy processing. Not to criticize the amazing work of Rod Prazeres, who has now commented on this thread.
Even straight-out-of-the-camera JPG files have been heavily processed - they are just hidden behind the RAW processor which we have taken for granted; not to mention smartphone photographs, which employ neural network in the processing pipeline.
Great, great work! Congratulations and Bravo Zulu! Looking forward to seeing the movie this weekend.
Everyone do yourselves a favor and skip all trailers and go see this movie. It was a delight start to finish. I was so glad I knew zero what the story was.
Astrophagology?
This is amazing. Your photos are art!
This post makes me want to go see the movie now. Is it in imax? I didn’t enjoy the book (Martian was his best) but maybe I will enjoy this
Why? I am currently reading the book as well, and I even though I am not a scientist I feel like I am finding small technical/scientific mistakes that shouldn't have had to be there.
Wow, congratulations!!
nice !