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Posted by: Steve G Feb 16 2015, 05:56 PM

I rarely make comments but I am on this site every single day. Though I admire the global mapping efforts made from spacecraft images, I dearly miss the airbrush maps we had in the seventies by J.L. Inge and P.M Bridges. I wish we'd go back to those.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Feb 16 2015, 06:33 PM

"I dearly miss the airbrush maps"

Totally agree, they were works of art of the highest order, not just copying photographs but reconciling all available data into one high value graphic. However, as my dear old buddy "This is it" used to say on the construction site I worked on many years ago, " 'Em days is gorn".

Well, not quite gorn, but almost. Most people, and certainly those working under the constant high pressure of mission operations, will never have the time to do that now. Only people who can step aside from that world and spend time on the work can make maps like those today. I might mention Ralph Aeschliman as an example.

http://ralphaeschliman.com/id22.htm

Phil

Posted by: Gerald Feb 16 2015, 07:10 PM

I could never ever do this quality manually.
But it's good to have a quasi-standard as a goal.
Retrieving inclination, altitude and albedo/color maps should be feasible, although really hard with OpNav3.
Besides naming, these seem to be the basic ingredients for the maps.
There should be ways to teach a computer how to combine these ingredients into a nice map. Something interesting to work on. Thanks!

Posted by: mcaplinger Feb 16 2015, 07:40 PM

I was pretty happy with the merged MOC/MOLA map that went into the 2001 National Geographic map of Mars: http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/space-maps/destination-mars-map

The airbrush maps were works of art but I question if they were objectively better than a modern topography/albedo digital product.

Posted by: elakdawalla Feb 16 2015, 07:56 PM

Yeah, I think that what made those airbrushed maps so special and different from photographic products is that they represented topography as much as (or more than!) they represented albedo. The shaded-relief MOLA maps are really nice products. Mattias Malmer's 3D modeling work in the Rosetta thread is a fine example of how topographic data is essential to that realistic feel of a map; and the reason Bjorn Jonsson's work on the Dawn Vesta data looks so good is because he's projecting albedo images onto topographic data. I look forward to having the Dawn topographic data set at Ceres that will allow us to make shaded-relief maps. And now I want to see shaded-relief maps of the major moons of the solar system -- I can't recall that I've ever seen anyone produce those.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Feb 16 2015, 09:24 PM

"The airbrush maps were works of art but I question if they were objectively better than a modern topography/albedo digital product."

I don't think they were better than what we have now, but they were far better than the kinds of digital mosaic or map that could have been made in the 1960s and 1970s, when people were working with Lunar Orbiter or Mariner 9 images.

Phil

Posted by: DrShank Feb 16 2015, 09:36 PM

Digital mapping techniques really took off in the early 1980's. Phil is right in that it wouldn't have been nearly as good, but I think some of it could have been done earlier to some degree but part of it also was that processing power was also much weaker and much more expensive then. The Mariner 9 digital maps were difficult to interpret so airbrush remained viable. the last official airbrush map was Triton, i believe.

Posted by: JTN Feb 16 2015, 10:18 PM

One of the main reasons I kept my 3rd ed of The New Solar System (Beatty/Chaikin) after getting the 4th was the airbrush maps in the back: as well as planets it has moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.

Posted by: stevesliva Feb 17 2015, 10:20 PM

I feel like I must direct your attention to this post from Machi:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=2743&view=findpost&p=214485

Posted by: Floyd Feb 17 2015, 10:33 PM

The genre is alive and doing extremely will with Machi's map... As many said when he posted: Wow!!!!

Posted by: Bjorn Jonsson Feb 22 2015, 02:06 PM

Luckily shape models/DEMs have become available for several of Saturn's satellites. See http://sbn.psi.edu/pds/archive/shape.html - a true goldmine for anyone interested in shape models. It's simple to produce shaded relief maps from these, the only problem is that of course albedo features will be completely missing. Here is a shaded relief map of Dione produced from the Gaskell shape model:



The sun illuminates everything from the west at an elevation angle of 30 degrees.

Posted by: john_s Feb 22 2015, 09:36 PM

For those who are interested, here are a couple of photos that I took at the Voyager 1 Saturn encounter in November 1980, showing Jay Inge (with Pat Bridges and Carl Sagan) making the first airbrush map of Mimas, a day or two after the flyby, using mylar lat/lon grid overlays to locate features.

Sadly, Jay died on April 1st last year. He was a good guy...

John

Posted by: Phil Stooke Feb 23 2015, 04:01 AM

Great photos.

The real value of airbrush maps over photomaps or DEMs is that they could be made when we didn't have good photomaps or DEMs. Mariner 9 mapping of Mars is a good example - there is far more information in the USGS airbrush maps than can be got out of the raw photomosaics (most people have never even seen those mosaics) as the images were so difficult to use and topography was almost non-existent. I agree that today's moon and mars maps can be done much better with GIS and modern datasets, but that wasn't true in the 'old days'. And it's not just the old days. I'm contemplating a new map of asteroid 243 Ida. We have great images for a small area of it, maybe 30%, but the rest is so poorly seen that it will be most effectively mapped by artistic shaded relief than by the very poor DEM in the low resolution area. Maybe in the summer...

Phil

Posted by: algorithm Feb 23 2015, 07:54 PM

Great photos indeed!

What an amazing futuristic looking bracelet the artist has on his left wrist.

It reminds me of when I try to tell my teenage kids about the difference between computers BCd (before cd) and now, AcD. (Don't get me started on RAM)

Quite remarkable things were accomplished with the tech available, many of them (including maps) are still comparable with what is achievable now.

Posted by: jasedm Feb 23 2015, 09:02 PM

Photos as time capsule, these are just sublime!

It's seven minutes past five, and no-one looks like they even want to think about going home.
Who has a pair of scissors and a ruler on their desk at JPL these days?
Smoking in the office??
Departure-lounge-type TV monitors on the wall
Digital wristwatch!!

Wonderful, thank you John!

Edit: got any more??

Posted by: djellison Feb 23 2015, 09:30 PM

This guy - ruler, scissors, mechanical pencil, and a clock made from a gear from a 2001 Williams F1 car's gearbox. My digital watch is a Pebble though.

Posted by: jasedm Feb 23 2015, 09:56 PM

Aaah some things don't change...
Nice to think also that perhaps Professor Sagan had a call later that evening from a PBS executive: "Say Carl! This 'Cosmos' series we're airing, viewing figures are through the roof - it's gonna be huge!"

Posted by: algorithm Feb 23 2015, 10:38 PM

The one thing that really struck me about the photos is that they are not just a screen grab of some archival film from a Discovery Channel programme, but real, genuine, personal, photos from someones album. Someone on this forum who was actually there!


Yeah, got any more.

What does the camera that took them look like!!

Posted by: stevesliva Feb 23 2015, 11:04 PM

The CRTs are quickly becoming an anachronism, but office chairs without wheels even more so.

Posted by: ngunn Feb 23 2015, 11:12 PM

I think we should have a photo of all that too, just for the record (maybe B&W for old times' sake).

Posted by: john_s Feb 23 2015, 11:59 PM

Well you asked for it- here's my http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~spencer/lpl/, which also contains photos from the Voyager 2 Uranus encounter if you scroll down to 1986. Most of the photos, though, are of people and social events at LPL (where I was a graduate student) which are of less interest unless you were there.

Note, by the way, that the "departure lounge type" monitor is showing a live parting shot of Saturn's shadow streaming across the rings- we were used to those by then, so no-one is paying attention.

John

Posted by: algorithm Feb 24 2015, 09:25 PM

Thanks for that. Brilliant.

Back in 1983 I was 17 so never knew you could do anything but play Chuckie Egg with a computer!