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ItchyK t1_iu794cs wrote

Yeah, edibles just kicking in and now you got me thinking. I guess there's really no correct orientation for these images. Just what we arbitrarily delineate as being the correct orientation. Also, I'm pretty sure most of the images of this that we're seeing are crops of a larger image and most likely rotated.

I think one thing to remember is that these pretty pictures really do "sell" the space program(s) to the general public. Some of the images were released to the public just because they looked cool. While other images are really purely for scientific purposes. I mean some of this stuff I don't think it's possible for it not to look cool. But other images are really stuff that only an astronomer or physics professor gets excited about.

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imdb_shenanigans t1_iu7kpia wrote

Other images? If you give me a A4 size sheet of paper and tell me these black and white dots represent 100 billion galaxies out there and I will then go "bleh, only interesting to an astronomer, unless you take an IMAX to a black hole, it ain't gonna impress me", this would indicate that when I thought I was "high and thinking", I was giving myself too much credit for the ability to think.

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ItchyK t1_iu7kx2c wrote

I'm talking about visually. And there's a lot of people who just don't give a shit about NASA and want to defund it. So putting out these cool pictures is a way of keeping the public interested.

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