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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Lunar Exploration _ Digitized Apollo Flight Films Available Online

Posted by: SkyeLab Aug 1 2007, 02:16 PM

From the following SpaceRef article:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=23141

Archive viewable here:

http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/

Enjoy!!!!!!!!

Brian

Posted by: tedstryk Aug 1 2007, 10:35 PM

This is really exciting. There was a early thread here a few years ago where we talked about hoping someone would do this. I know I personally have avoided working with Apollo imagery because I didn't want to waste my time enhancing crappy multi-generation-negative based scans when I knew the originals existed (as opposed to some Russian data, for example, where I am not sure if the original data even does exist). Thanks!

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Aug 1 2007, 11:31 PM

Someone pass the swear jar.

Posted by: Tman Aug 6 2007, 11:16 AM

That is fantastic - finally! That's (was) on many wish listes for a long time.

http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/METRIC_PREVIEW/AS15-M-0083/AS15-M-0083.html

Posted by: djellison Aug 6 2007, 11:32 AM

The headlines on this story are missleading. It should be 'Digitized Apollo Flight Films TO BE MADE Available Online'

Doug

Posted by: Tman Aug 6 2007, 11:49 AM

You're right. First I was disappointed too

Posted by: paxdan Aug 6 2007, 12:23 PM

I gotta confess I was too.

What i'd been hoping for was a downloadable archive of the 'movies' shot from the LRV Camera. There is a sequence i saw on a C4 chillout show years ago consisting of about 5-10 mins of the view forward during a drive between sites. It was really high quality and i'd love to get my hands on it. Yes i've seen the films on the ALSJ.

This also brings up another question, i have never ever encountered a name for the LRVs, beyond the generic 'moon buggy'. Anyone heard if they were even given nicknames?

Posted by: Phil Stooke Aug 8 2007, 12:19 AM

It's off topic... but no, the LRVs were never given individual nicknames. They were just referred to as "the LRV" every time. Check out the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal for exhaustve evidence.

Phil

Posted by: dvandorn Aug 8 2007, 05:45 PM

More specifically, the LRVs were referred to as simply "the rover" in most instances. Each did have its own designation, of course -- LRV-1, LRV-2 and LRV-3. (LRV-4 was partially built and then converted into a one-G trainer.) LRVs 2 and 3 each benefitted from experience on the previous missions, and LRV-3 was outfitted rather differently from the first two, with significant changes to the geology pallet (where the tools were kept), the removal of the 16-mm DAC and its mounting pole, and the addition of the SEP receiver and antenna.

-the other Doug

Posted by: malgar Aug 13 2007, 10:03 PM

DILO suggested me to work on Metric Cam samples reported here:
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/METRIC_PREVIEW/
He gived me cropped/rescaled version of first two pictures (AS15-M-0081/82)
I produced an anaglyph:
http://img252.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ana4as15m0082scomprfr6.jpg

and a Digital Elevation Model using my program "shape from stereo".
Resolution is 50px resampled to 1px with a spline interpolation. I tried a better resolution but I got noise problems.
Here a 3d view of the scene:

Cheers,
Ale

Posted by: dilo Aug 14 2007, 06:22 AM

Great work, Alex! My attempt to make anaglyph from these images wasn't so good...
I think you should better explain how your "shape from stereo" program works, this is something completely different from photoclinometry you did in the past.

A couple of considerations about the project:
Based on technical data they report http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/ABOUT_SCANS/index.html, scanner resolution is 14 bit/color; however, from raw image size they report, image depth is 15 bit for metric camera and 16bit/color for all other standards, except the 35mm negative which were scanned with only 8bit/channel resolution. About latter format, they say scan is already completed, so I wonder why they didn't publish yet.
I computed that total size of the final archive and the result is impressive: almost 70 TB of raw/TIFF images, the majority of wich will be from panoramic camera. If someone wants to download all this huge archive, consider that it will take almost one year of CONTINUOUS download at an average speed of 20 Mbit/sec! Even to download "small" PNG images (only 1/4 original size and 8 bit resolution) you'll need almost two months with a more realistic 10 Mbit/s, 8 hours/day connection...

Posted by: FordPrefect Nov 14 2007, 10:53 PM

Hey all, just thought its worth mentioning, that the first series of metric images taken from Apollo 15 are available now, each from low to hi resolutions (high=1.2 GB!) Great stuff!

http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/webmap-bin/apollo.pl