Space.com Shares Space Cats Video

Via Huffington Post - In the spirit of April Fools' Day, SPACE.com shares a hilarious video about a fictional character named Brant Widgen who works as an "image enhancement engineer" whose primary job is to remove adorable but pesky cats from the foreground of space photos.

"I usually receive a folder filled with new space images, and my task is to clear them up," Widgen says in the video. "I tweak some of the contrast, the color palette, and most of the time - I'd say 80 percent of the time - is the removal of a cat."

The video was posted on YouTube by Andy Freeberg, who told SPACE.com that it was created by some of his friends to poke fun at the ongoing debate about "fake" images of the cosmos. "The friends that made it were joking about all of the YouTube comments where people claim NASA is photoshopping their content to fake things," Freeberg said in an email.



The character of Widgen is fictional, and Freeberg said his friend, Ryan, improvised most of the lines.

"I also just love the idea that there's this guy out there whose entire job is sitting in a cubicle and photoshopping cats out of astronomical images and yet who talks about it in a completely matter-of-fact way," Freeberg said. 

For Freeberg and his friends, the video is also something of a commentary.

"One of the best parts about the video is that it plays on the idea of what is 'real' and the skepticism people have surrounding anything involving space," Freeberg said. "Forget the moon landing conspiracy, we've just blown the roof off of the space cat conspiracy and the world will never be the same."

 Read full story at http://huff.to/HbcS9W