Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Pixels in the Shroud Image?

In 1992, while taking some photomicrographs of some fiber lifted from the shroud in 1978, Kevin E. Moran noticed something that he called pixels. The term stuck:

At 200x magnification it is seen that these picture elements, or pixels, are very uniformly darkened about 30% over the natural color of the non-imaged fiber. At the boundary between image pixel and clear fiber, there is a sharp change.

Later, Ray Rogers would disagree with Moran’s characterization of sharp boundaries. They were, he thought, “polarization effects” caused by a polarizer in the microscope system. Nonetheless, Moran brought the word pixel into the lexicon of shroud image characteristics. And even if Moran’s clear boundaries are not really boundaries, hence pixels in one sense of the word, the idea is still relevant. The image is clearly, unmistakably made of discontinuities of color and it is by visual blending of these picture elements that we see various shades or tones of yellow.

In 2004, I wrote out an interpretation in which I tried to avoid using the word pixel. I sent it to Ray Rogers hoping to solicited his agreement:

A better interpretation might be to say that it appears that much, but not necessarily all, of what we perceive as different shades of color is due to visual blending from concentrations or densities of spots of color that are closely uniform in color.

I was groping. I was trying to find a middle ground. In my mind if visual blending was how we perceived the colors in the images then pixels was the right term to use. But I wanted to avoid using the term so I spoke of spots.  “Right,” he wrote back. “But they [the spots of color] are essentially identical in color (spectrum) and somewhat different in color density.”