Starball?

[Tethys]

I found a prickly ball with an asymmetrical star and a raised rim on the top, a flattened bottom, and what looks like a short stalk. It measures 68 mm across including the stalk, 48 mm tall, and it is missing parts of its edge and side. Inside it is a pale beige chert. The exterior is very finely ornamented and covered with tiny angular holes that are making my camera pixelate. I have done my best to capture the fine detail, There are also some tiny pyrite ooids in the deeper areas on the face and on the bottom. The stalk feature is encrusted in bright white lime, and has resisted all attempts to photograph it. It is the piece that sticks out at the top of the pics. It is located at the same level as the lower edge and is 14mm in diameter and appx. 8 mm in length. It is segmented like an orange in cross section. As viewed from the top, the star face is mostly complete. The left arm of the star is broken away, and the rim is missing at the broken edges at bottom and right side. Thanks for looking!

Edited August 10, 2014 by Tethys

[Tethys]

More top views.

Edited August 10, 2014 by Tethys

[Tethys]

Blocking the stalk from view. A pic of the right side showing some of the upper edge broken away and deep fissures between plates.

Edited August 10, 2014 by Tethys

[Tethys]

Two views of the bottom. The stalk is at the lower right corner with the opening facing right.. It is iron stained and chipped. Dimensions are 63 mm x 44 mm.

Edited August 10, 2014 by Tethys

[Tethys]

If anyone can tell me why my photos lose all the fine. crisp details between cropping and brightening and uploading them here, I would be forever grateful. The more I try to adjust it, the more detail I seem to lose.

[Wrangellian]

Your pics appear to have too much processing, or are heavily compressed... Is there some other function that your software might be applying alongside your attempts to brighten/etc? I would look first to the quality that the files are being saved at. If all else fails, try posting as raw an image as you can and one of us will work on it for you. Until then I can't say what you have!

btw you are photoing under sunlight, right?

[Ludwigia]

I'd say you need a better camera. Can't recognize a thing here let alone a star.

[painshill]

I would suggest it’s because you’re not using a “camera” as most of us would understand it. The embedded file information says you’re using an IPEVO P2V which is a 24-bit USB portable “document camera” that captures still frames from video footage. It has a true 2 MegaPixel CMOS (which isn’t great compared to modern digital compacts in the 16-20 MegaPixel range) but the size of the sensor in document cameras like this is small and that affects the overall resolution.

Image quality is never just about the number of MegaPixels, otherwise a 24MP phone camera would give you a better resolution image than a 12MP digital SLR and that isn’t the case because there is a vast difference in the actual size of the sensors. Also a vast difference in contrast capability between the multi-element optically corrected glass lens of an SLR and the single-element plastic lens of a phone camera. The lens on your document camera is also unlikely to be a high quality optic.

The pictures you’re posting have a resolution of only 96 dpi (dots per inch) whereas a compact camera will generally give you more like 300 dpi as the default.

I’m afraid that if you want better images then you need a “proper” camera.

[Tethys]

Thank you for the detailed explanation Painshill. I realize my USB camera is not the best, but it is all I have to work with for the foreseeable future. I am losing image quality in the windows photo editing process. Within the camera program I can zoom in on the fine details. After uploading through windows it looks like what you see above. I am reattaching the best original file as an experiment to see if reverting it makes it into a file that is focused.

[painshill]

If that's the image quality being generated at source then what's mostly wrong with it is it's way too bright and desperately lacks contrast. Here, I've adjusted it to 20% less brightness and 30% more contrast.

Here, I've taken it down another 30% in brightness and up another 30% in contrast. With a bit more tinkering and some colour adjustment I could do better, but you get the idea.

I see you're using the editor that comes with Windows Live Photo Gallery, so you should be able to make the same kinds of adjustments... but a photo-editor can't give you more detail than was present in the original image. The "sharpen" tools in such editors don't really sharpen the image in a true optical sense. They just create an illusory effect by using a mask which exaggerates the brightness difference along the edges within the image. That's perfectly satisfactory for your holiday snaps and such but it's not good for scientific work unless you are prepared to pay a lot of money for more sophisticated software. At the end of the day a 96 dpi image is still a 96 dpi image and although you can increase the dpi it will only make a difference to the image when you print it. Computer screens work with a fixed number of pixels for any given screen resolution setting, so upping the dpi won't make the slightest difference.

Edited August 8, 2014 by painshill

[tmaier]

Still the photo doesn't show the detail.

"asymmetrical star and a raised rim on the top, a flattened bottom, and what looks like a short stalk"

Sounds like a crinoid or a rugose coral.

Rugose Coral, half eroded away...

[Tethys]

Is this better? I can make those adjustments without losing clarity in the camera program before taking the picture, but if I then crop and adjust in windows it degrades the image. The surface of this thing really is covered with a pattern of intricate interlocking mosaic shapes with sharp angular edges and it's riddled with angular holes. My fingertips are all abraded from handling it.

[tmaier]

YES! That is working...

I think I see the calyx and arms of a crinoid, mixed with some other "stuff".

The calynx is the "head" on the upper part of the crinoid.

Here's an illustration of a crinoid draw by my helper monkey...

[Wrangellian]

Sounds like it's your Windows program that's doing things to it that you don't want it to, without you knowing. I would guess that there is some setting it is on which automatically reduces the image quality or size, which you don't see because it's in some menu somewhere and you'd have to go looking for it? I've had other programs in the past which automatically dropped the jpg quality upon saving, and when I realized this I got into the habit of checking that setting myself every time I save.

I don't lose quality when I adjust it (and save) with my PhotoStudio:

Anyway I still have no clue what your item is!

[Auspex]

As rough and porous as the matrix is, I think there's a good chance that a lot of material has dissolved out of it; this presents its own ID challenges by making it hard to visualize what was there originally.

[Tethys]

A close up of what I thought was ooids on the bottom. After magnification it might be more surface ornament. A false color image of the bottom. Another attempt at the inside of the stalk.

Edited August 10, 2014 by Tethys

[Wrangellian]

I think Auspex might be right.. I think your pic in post 12 is the best so far, and it looks like a small stalk of something (or pinnule?) right of center there. The 'ooid' one is good too (might those be 'beekite'?), But the other pics are a bit blurry.. I wonder if your camera has an ideal focal distance which you have not found..? Usually when people post blurry closeup cellphone images it's because they're trying to get more detail by putting the item closer to the lens but it's too close.

[Wrangellian]

Then again I still see horizontal (mostly) and vertical pixel lines in some of these, so that's still a problem..

[painshill]

I wonder if your camera has an ideal focal distance which you have not found..? Usually when people post blurry closeup cellphone images it's because they're trying to get more detail by putting the item closer to the lens but it's too close.

We're talking about one of these (are we not?):

It's essentially a document camera using a USB web-cam to capture still images from video format. It should focus down to 5cm but has no built-in illumination. If the proprietary software that came with it is being used then it's doing something to the video format during the conversion process to jpeg that isn't helping. Either that or something in the Windows Live editing suite is perhaps inadvertently set to do something that isn't helping when you crop and re-save. I've never used the Windows software so don't know what default settings it has.

[Tethys]

I found one issue within the windows uploader. It was set so that I lost 5 % of the information with compression which results in pictures which are just a hair out of focus. I am also just having a hard time getting the camera to focus on holes. The more I magnify, the more intricate structure is revealed but I can't capture it unless I have the camera perfectly parallel. I'm going to try attaching one more time and if it isn't a nice clear shot I am going to concede defeat. I have poked around in the literature on Lower Ordovician and there are several oddballs that do resemble my find. Anomalocrinus incurvus or it's holdfast looks like a cousin. Blastoidocrinus carchariaedens has parts that look exactly like the structure in the "valley" at 3 o'clock on mine. There are also edrioasteroids and pyrgocystoids in the excellent talk by Dr. Summral on youtube that are of the right size and have tiny plates and ornament that matches almost exactly. (7:22) The thing I am taking for a stalk could easily be an arm on an edrioasteroid. Here are the pictures. Hopefully the third time is the charm and they won't be fuzzy.

[Wrangellian]

I'm not familiar with your gadget but your pics are getting better. I think they (the 2nd one above at least) still have that 'melted' look that I get when I heavily despeckle an image or heavily sharpen a blurry one (My program does neither of these things automatically, maybe whatever you're using does).. Still can't help you with ID but trying to help with the pics using my limited knowledge. I guess nothing beats a good digital cam. in full sunlight..

[Tethys]

Better, but still losing some of the fine detail. I can zoom in best on this one.

[Tethys]

Thank you for the feedback and technical assistance, I really appreciate it I was ready to schedule an eye exam after I uploaded my photos and they looked like blurred blobs after I had spent hours getting them as perfect as possible. The melted/corroded look is sadly, a characteristic of many of the fossils from the Prairie du Chien. They weathered for a few eons before the St. Peter got deposited.

[Wrangellian]

The melted look I was referring to is an artifact of the processing... To me it looks like the pic on the right, here, which I have heavily applied the Despeckle function to just to illustrate:

[painshill]

... after I uploaded my photos and they looked like blurred blobs after I had spent hours getting them as perfect as possible....

That may be part of the problem too. The JEPG file format is a compressed image. That's why it's a much smaller file than a RAW image or a bitmap file for the same number of pixels. Every time you change something by editing and then re-save the file, the algorithm for compressing the data runs again to optimise the size of the file. That means the image quality drops with each "save" and it's most noticeable on images which were not high quality to begin with. That doesn't happen with "lossless" formats like RAW and bitmap.

The implication for that is if you spend a long time editing and tinkering with a JPEG file and save it frequently you will notice a progressive loss in image quality which may begin to have that "melted" look. Even if you don't save the image yourself, many image editing programs are set to "auto-save" the picture whenever it has changed (or every x minutes) so you don't lose your hard work if a program crashes.