alt Hacker NewsFalse colour composites were something I was introduced to in high school GIS and did a lot of in undergrad remote sensing. It was one of those Eureka! moments for me in terms of developing a better understanding of signals and signal processing, as well as sensors and data collection. Ie. absorbing the reality that the way in which my eyes (or any optical sensor) see the world is not canonical. Vegetation is red, not green!
It was also just the COOLEST THING EVER to swap infrared bands in LANDSAT ETM+ imagery and watch vegetation immediately pop out at you. It's what turned this sort of dull (at least for a teenager) geoscience into a kind of puzzle where you have to figure out how to bring the signal up out of the data.
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And, insects see flowers (and each other) differently than we do, as they are senstive to different parts of the spectrum, specfically ultraviolet. They see patterns and markings that are not discernable to human eyes.
It's really fun to play with black and white photography using various kinds of color filters and see how different you can get the same scene to appear.
(Also fun to play with a polarizing filter.)
> Ie. absorbing the reality that the way in which my eyes (or any optical sensor) see the world is not canonical. Vegetation is red, not green!
Pretty funny to figure out that your perspective wasn't objective reality and then immediately decide to canonicalize another arbitrary reality as the One True Reality.
> False colour composites were something I was introduced to in high school GIS
As an old guy, this is something I'm jealous of in a positive way. I'm impressed that schools are offering this type of subject. My senior year was the first year to introduce a "computer science" class where I learned PASCAL on an Apple SE/30. The year after I graduated, the school created an actual computer lab. To be honest, I haven't even thought about looking to see what is available in schools today, but nice to hear something positive