Words stating these pictures are composites (my website)
A while back it came to my attention that one of my pictures depicting the crescent Moon and the crescent Venus is being shared
– again – across the internet, via social media. The problem is people just left out the fact that it is a composite.
So I hereby state to have nothing to do with those misleading shares as I shared my pictures with captions/descriptions both in English (spaceweathergallery) and in Hungarian (my homepage).
Full story
About a year ago I photographed a not so close conjunction of the crescent new moon and a similarly thin crescent of planet Venus. Although the article I wrote and published on my website is in Hungarian, it is clearly stated which pictures are the ones recorded and which are edited (montage, composite) in order to emphasize something: relative surface brightness and angular size. The picture I shared (grey frame added just a bit later for the same reason I write this notice) was an obvious montage and had the obvious caption clearly stating that I put the Moon and Venus together for comparison.
Noteworthy that due to the misleading shares, I had to have a very awkward dialog with Emily Lakdawalla from The Planetary Society. So yes, sharing/redditing/tumblring/tweeting part information hurts people.
RTFM and keep the captions
I have two messages for the people sharing my pictures: 1) RTFM. Always. 2) If it’s about sharing a really close Venus-Moon conjunction (which I just wasn’t lucky to photograph myself due to reasons like the movement of the celestial orbs…), share Iván ÉDER’s picture made from the right place and at the right time. Or share anything from me READING AND KEEPING THE CAPTION that explains what the pixels are on the picture.
What are my pictures?
Some of the pictures I publish here, on my personal website, are raw photographs. Some are developed through the long process of stacking multiple frames or many gigabytes of videos. Some are the result of compositing like 35 GiB raw data. Some are composited due to obvious reasons and through well explained methods. Some are mosaics. Some are developed from raws in the Hubble archive. Some are generated with 3D animation based on my photos. Some are more like paintings because why not? I mean this is not a scientific journal lacking artistic impressions: I am a creative person confined by the single rule of being fair and honest about what and how I do in order to obtain something.
Fly Me to the Moon – picture of the day on space.com. I am lucky to have witnessed this with my scope and camera at hand.
The Moon is a stack of about 20 frames. The silhouettes are a drawing of mine.
