I made this! https://imgur.com/a/IQGLcrR Unfortunately the source is kind of weird which is why this one isn't smooth, I'll probably try to find another source soon but here's this for now

Aww thank you! 😍 I really appreciate the positive feedback! I get a lot of pushback for calling some of my work stereoscopic, even though to me that's just a description of the medium

>When I first saw this I was wondering how you had generated the left and right images and thought you may have been using images captured at different times to simulate the lateral separation.

Yes! So glad people get it. There's something really magical about watching the world this way. I mentioned doing this with the ISS, however there's more macro footage of the whole globe rotating that this can be accomplished with, and it's amazing because this creates an illusion of depth to the sun's reflection off the Earth, which I did not expect. Vision is so cool.

I'm curious, as I discovered how to do this using self-teachings, are you familiar with a name for this technique? I've been referring to it as motion parallax but I'm not sure if that's entirely correct when making a stereograph out of two different frames in time.

Thanks again for your feedback!

Yes. The top row on the left frame is the previous frame in time, while the top right frame is the next frame in time. The bottom row on the left is the next frame in time, and on the right is the previous frame in time.

These will look different depending on how you view the illusion: cross-eye or parallel-eye. Top row is better for cross-eye due to how our eyes work, and the bottom row is better for parallel-eye for the same reason.

Some people don't cross their eyes but instead split or diverge them. This means the cross-eye image would be depth-inverted, where the depth of the Earth appears concave while the moon appears to be behind the depth distance of the Earth.

Basically, if you look at the top row while diverging eyes or the bottom row while converging eyes you will always see an inverse depth map.

You can rotate the image to merge top and bottom, however this experience isn't ideal. For simplicity you can just merge the top or bottom two without worrying about the vertical axis

Thank you so much for saying that! And oh man, that's so neat. I never had the resources to go to college but if I had I would have worked on something stereoscopic too. I love to nerd out about stereoscopy.

You might like this, I used to do this regularly when I figured out the motion parallax process: You can watch the livestream of the ISS and as long as the camera is facing the planet so that the earth is moving left to right, you can place two of these streams next to each other, like a stereograph, and pause one for 5-10 seconds to see depth of the atmosphere. This functions like pausing the orbit of one eye while the other keeps moving, so you can in essence get live parallax of the atmosphere from orbit! If the ISS is over mountains, you can actually see depth to them. It's wild.

I make these as a hobby so if you'd like to see more I often post across the internet with this username. Have you made any stereo imagery yourself?

https://imgur.com/gallery/ZPtpLAE

This isn't quite what you asked for, that'll take me some time, but here's this for now

Thanks! I learned how as a small child from Magic Eye books, I loved illusion puzzles

>This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth - one million miles away.

Credits: NASA/NOAA

I made this stereo gif by using motion parallax to get depth, where you use the next and previous frames to make a stereograph. The top row is for cross-eye viewing, the bottom row for parallel-eye viewing

While this illusion is cool, the moon does appear much closer to the Earth than it is in reality. The moon is vastly farther than the impression you'd get from just this GIF alone

I hear you. Never my intention to mislead! I struggle with explaining this in a way that everyone seems to be happy with 😅

I'm open to feedback on what makes for a more accurate title

That's incredible! I might have to steal that idea

^(slams) ^(into) ^^(quantum) ^^(moon)

I super agree! I learned how to see magic eye and stereographs before learning to read, so it's become second nature. I'd always merge similar houses and fences, I loved seeing the differences like that

Yep! It's a simple process. I believe it works because the lensing is already showing a mirror-like reflection.

This idea came from natural symmetry of Hamilton's Object, which I've decided to explain and post stereographs of on Imgur, for those interested in a deeper look at the ideas.

The intention is to emphasize symmetry through stereoscopic depth. By "fake" I believe you mean it's not depth from parallax, which is true, but that isn't the point as lensing of this sort has recursive reflective symmetry which is the intended source of depth instead of parallax

Viewing on a smaller screen, like a phone, can be easier. My Instagram has more you could try than I've posted to Reddit. However in my experience it does vary from person to person and I'm not sure why

It's more that there generally isn't a well fitting word for what I'm doing. "Stereoscopic" is the closest, though; "noting or pertaining to three-dimensional vision or any of various processes and devices for giving the illusion of depth from two-dimensional images or reproductions, as of a photograph or motion picture."

It accurately conveys the medium, viewing method and the intended subject, which is the symmetry. As long as I get those things across

Oh jeez, oh man, sorry, I meant to post this to Timber Hearth not Earth

Edit: I posted a slightly more in-depth explanation of why I made this gif, here, for those curious

??

It may not be stereoscopic parallax, but I do make these to be viewable with stereoscopes so it is stereoscopic by definition, if that's what you mean

Far left and far right are the same relative image. Middle is mirrored.

I explain more about why in this comment here

Your two panels here are the same image side by side (whereas the cut out center panel was mirrored). This gives an illusion of depth because of the position that your eyes are relative to the rest of your surroundings, on top of some visual artifacting created from copying or exporting as a gif. For my gif you should only see 4 panels total while crossed, including periphery. It is pretty tricky to see

edit: To clarify I recommend thinking of this GIF as data visualization in a stereoscopic medium, where the depth illusion is created by reflected symmetry, and not the usual parallax stereograph, where two pictures are taken of the same object from slightly different angles. Stereographs usually use parallax, but not always, sorry for the confusion!

You are correct that this is reversed/mirrored in the center. I have 3 panels so that both cross-eye and uncross-eye are visible at one time. There should be 4 panels total when crossed correctly, two opaque in the middle and two "see through" panels in the periphery on either side. It is tricky to see for sure.

The reasons why I mirror these have to do with symmetry of lensing, where the same image appears on opposite sides of the lens with black holes, as well as the mirroring effect with strong gravitational lensing, where galaxies can be seen as mirrored smears, sometimes multiple times.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

>A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, spiral toward a collision. For the first time, a new computer simulation that fully incorporates the physical effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity shows that gas in such systems will glow predominantly in ultraviolet and X-ray light.

>Just about every galaxy the size of our own Milky Way or larger contains a monster black hole at its center. Observations show galaxy mergers occur frequently in the universe, but so far no one has seen a merger of these giant black holes.

>Scientists have detected merging stellar-mass black holes -- which range from around three to several dozen solar masses -- using the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Gravitational waves are space-time ripples traveling at the speed of light. They are created when massive orbiting objects like black holes and neutron stars spiral together and merge.

>Supermassive mergers will be much more difficult to find than their stellar-mass cousins. One reason ground-based observatories can't detect gravitational waves from these events is because Earth itself is too noisy, shaking from seismic vibrations and gravitational changes from atmospheric disturbances. The detectors must be in space, like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) led by ESA (the European Space Agency) and planned for launch in the 2030s.

>But supermassive binaries nearing collision may have one thing stellar-mass binaries lack -- a gas-rich environment. Scientists suspect the supernova explosion that creates a stellar black hole also blows away most of the surrounding gas. The black hole consumes what little remains so quickly there isn't much left to glow when the merger happens.

>Supermassive binaries, on the other hand, result from galaxy mergers. Each supersized black hole brings along an entourage of gas and dust clouds, stars and planets. Scientists think a galaxy collision propels much of this material toward the central black holes, which consume it on a time scale similar to that needed for the binary to merge. As the black holes near, magnetic and gravitational forces heat the remaining gas, producing light astronomers should be able to see.

>The new simulation shows three orbits of a pair of supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging. The models reveal the light emitted at this stage of the process may be dominated by UV light with some high-energy X-rays, similar to what's seen in any galaxy with a well-fed supermassive black hole.

>Three regions of light-emitting gas glow as the black holes merge, all connected by streams of hot gas: a large ring encircling the entire system, called the circumbinary disk, and two smaller ones around each black hole, called mini disks. All these objects emit predominantly UV light. When gas flows into a mini disk at a high rate, the disk's UV light interacts with each black hole's corona, a region of high-energy subatomic particles above and below the disk. This interaction produces X-rays. When the accretion rate is lower, UV light dims relative to the X-rays.

>Based on the simulation, the researchers expect X-rays emitted by a near-merger will be brighter and more variable than X-rays seen from single supermassive black holes. The pace of the changes links to both the orbital speed of gas located at the inner edge of the circumbinary disk as well as that of the merging black holes.

>The simulation ran on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Modeling three orbits of the system took 46 days on 9,600 computing cores.

Read more: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-simulation-sheds-light-on-spiraling-supermassive-black-holes