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Seattle skyline at night seen from the middle of Puget Sound. Phone camera doesn't do it justice.
@azonenberg are you violating ITAR/EAR?
@whitequark @azonenberg Andrew can violate a little ITAR,,, as a treat
@gsuberland @azonenberg well yes i am in favor obviously. However,
@whitequark Nope. Images taken through NVGs are just "basic marketing information" and not controlled, tube vendors etc publish them all the time.
If you had a calibration chart of known contrast and angular size etc in view, that might be an issue. This image isn't remotely good enough for anyone to figure out performance of the tube from.
@azonenberg fascinating, I would think that if it's illegal to let a non-national to see through an US NVG it would be illegal to publish images too
@whitequark Handing it to a foreign national even temporarily could be considered a deemed export of the tube itself, a controlled item.
That's a whole different situation.
@whitequark You can see this in play a while back when Veritasium visited a US army research facility and did a video on NVGs. They had no problem letting the team film stuff and put it on youtube.
Where they drew the line was letting him film through the one in the lab pointed at a resolution test target.
@whitequark The thing that I find more interesting is that tube vendors sometimes sell high vs low spec tubes as different price bins and will advertise some of the performance thresholds they use for the bins.
That is a gray area IMO wrt what's marketing info and what's tech data. I wouldn't do it myself.
@whitequark The full datasheet I have from L3 specifying the SNR, dark current, gain, resolution, etc. of my specific tube? That's clearly marked as ITAR tech data.
Images, maaaaaybe unless traceable to the point they could reasonably be used to extrapolate specs, are not.
@azonenberg @whitequark Not that I would be able to do anything useful with that, but the skyline of Seattle should be pretty well-defined, no? Couldn't I generate a reference image with Google Earth or MS Flight Simulator?
@floe @whitequark The photo doesn't show nearly enough detail though compared to what you'd see naked eye. I can see motion blur from my phone not being held still, etc.
It's also a very bright scene, the gain is nowhere near maxed so the SNR is excellent, etc. you really can't extract any of the controlled specs from it even if you wanted to.
@whitequark
One of the scariest question to be asked IMO
@azonenberg
@magnetic_tape @whitequark If you're unsure, maybe. But in this case it's well established from (among other things) years of manufacturers publishing example images etc without any nastygrams from the state dept.
@magnetic_tape @whitequark All of the tube data sheets and full specs are clearly marked as controlled and not available online, while none of the images are marked as controlled and are openly published.
(And they're much better images than this)