There has always been a reliance on common sense. Blindly posting image just for the sake of it is a silly thing to do full stop. I have said in UMSF previously - if you have alternate hosting options to attaching at UMSF - use them.

Furthermore, I don't think more than a tiny percentage of the people here realise that every image attached has to be backed up. The uploads folder is now so large that I have to ask the hosts to zip it up and put it in the root so I can download it manually, not the work of a moment when it weighs in at 2.5 Gig. This means that instead of a weekly backup - the uploads folder is usually backed up monthly. Whereas the DB itself is done weekly.

Doug

Not really. And we sure as hell don't need it in the Route Map thread.

THe orbit was previously designed, as I understand it, so that Earth was always visible from the spacecraft - it didn't go 'behind' Venus from our perspective...but now it does which gives an opportunity for radio science during ingress and egress

Doug

50%ish sized movie and a 100% sized still from the Stereo A flyby of the Moon on Dec 15th last year - taken throught the H2 camera ( that looks, during the proper mission, at the space between the Earth and the Sun ) this is all imagery of the 'dark' half of the moon lit by Earthshine.

Doug

I'm still waiting for that one navcam pan that makes me go "THAT...is the one"

I think it's a bit further yet - from a perspective that will show us our arrival point really clearly.

Doug

Well - unless you intend to only have the one thread for the best bits of HiRISE images for the next decade.....'per release' makes a LOT more sense

Also - just cropping out sections because they are 'nice' is extra server storage that is getting consumed very rapidly.

Doug

Perhaps the interaction of the rockets during landing - not sure how much or for how long it would make an impact on the ground though.

Doug

Ahh - great stuff, I'll give it a go.

And now, at last, a thread to find out about Rosetta in Celestia. There are several different models/trajectories - do you know which will most accurately show the Mars flyby next month?

Doug

The only thing I wasn't impressed with with the 'old' stuff was the clothing, and I designed this new logo specifically so it would look better for that. The old mug, coaster, badge etc looked good - but I think the colour was a 'must have' to give them something extra.

I've had my old mug for 18 months or so - I've found that putting it thru the dishwasher isn't too good for it - it's begun to peel the 'sheen' a little - might have been a symptom of the printing process that they've fixed, might still be a problem.

Best sellers...

8 bumper stickers, 4 grey T-shirts, buttons and mugs all as 2. No one's gone for the teddy bear (I'm tempted)

You know - seing UMSF on some one elses monitor feels really really wierd...don't know why

Doug

For those of you that use, would like to use or have used Cassini raw imagery - this thread...
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...amp;#entry81910
Will be of interest.

Doug

It was imaged, a picture leaked onto a different website, then realised it shouldn't have been made public, so taken off again......and sooner or later HiROC will release it properly

Doug

I'm amazed everyone here hasn't already seen it

Doug

Who'd have thought they'd need drive direction imagery after spending eleventy seven million sols parked in the area.

Doug

Over the past 3 years, we've been fortunate enough to have an ever expanding library of nearly 200,000 images from the Mars Exploration Rovers thrown onto the web as uncalibrated JPG's for enthusiasts like ourselves to get our teeth in to. The success of this is written on the walls of UMSF and elsewhere, and most remarkably, the scientists and engineers involved were pleased to see people getting their hands on 'their' data. Jim Bell even commented on Planetary Radio in November '05 :
"The team really appreciates the public support, and we put the images out there every day on marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and people download them and make their own mosaics and panoramas and do their own analysis and we think that's great - it's great to have the public along for the ride"

Cassini followed suit and after some trouble getting images that were not overly stretched the workflow was sorted out and amazing images have been making it onto the JPL website ever since. From time to time we've seen some great results - mosaics, colour composites, animation - great work and a fantastic credit to the Cassini team, their policy of putting images online and the example set by MER.

However - over the last 18 months or so there have been some rumours and unpleasant undertones regarding Cassini imagery. Some enthusiasts who have created amazing images found that their creations were not universally appreciated. There seemed to be an unspoken 'look but don't touch' policy in place regarding the raw JPG's and thus they stopped working with Cassini imagery or took down bits of their websites and so on.

Over the past year or so, the UMSF mod and admin team have been discussing this, and recently we contacted JPL for clarification. Could we find some way to give people the confidence to get creative with the Cassini images as they have with MER images? I want to thank the Cassini outreach team for responding to us so positively and for everyone involved in helping us establish in writing what we all hoped was true, but were perhaps a little unsure of. I'm happy to report that the Cassini images are out there for us to use and enjoy in exactly the same way we do with MER imagery.

To confirm that - recently there has been an addition to the text on the Raw Images page saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

"Welcome to the Cassini raw image section, where the Cassini mission and Cassini outreach are happy to provide these raw images for the public to use and enjoy. ... "

As with MER - if you do something with the Cassini images - you should cite where the data comes from. For MER it has always been NASA/JPL/Cornell and for Cassini it should be NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. For those of you that may have had concerns or doubts about getting thoroughly stuck in to the Cassini imagery, then you can put those fears aside and get stuck in - to cite a senior Cassini team member:

"Our intent in creating the raw image page was to accomplish exactly what Jim Bell said for the MER Project. The public is paying the bill for this, so we should be doing everything we can to help them enjoy the ride"

So - crack open your photo editing software and start exploring Saturn!

Thanks to Alice and the team at JPL for helping us with this, and personal thanks to the rest of the mod and admin team who, as ever, knew the rights words to say at the right time.

Doug

Not sure if it's a calibration or reprojection issue - but there's something of a corduroy effect in there, especially in darker areas. Very very cool image though

Doug

Several posts in the manned -v- unmanned debate (which is basically the same as Hubble is awesome / Hubble is a waste of money argument) catagory all deleted.

You KNOW the rules. Stop trying to test them. Several increasingly 'usual suspects' of this sort ot thing in this thread - long time members who should know better by now.

Doug

Tried again - 33cm/pixel ( it just seems better at that res ) - with all the landers pointing with arms going north...makes it harder to see with a 30 degree high Sun off to the west - as the shadow falls more under the lander and less onto the ground beside it. Thanks for the pointers Mark

Doug

Indeed - there isn't a specific way to do that, but the initial poster could edit his post to make clear that it's not available anymore.

Doug

That's fair enough - sometimes people use slides in a 'live' event that they don't want being made available after the event.

Doug

I now have a mental picture of Phoenix, with a broken transmitter after the long winter - waking up in 2011, and using the arm to fashion the local terrain into a replica of the ATLO facility.

Doug

I've re-tweaked my sim of Phoenix. I wish I could get the right ammount of detail to show - still not quite there, it's a bit too sharp...I'll get it right eventually.

Also - the orig test image of the model - it's basically a VRML I found of MPL, + different arrays. I know the deck has changed shape, but at 33cm/pixel it's about right

Doug

Well - other rocks may have done the same thing, but long enough ago that the bounce marks have since been blown to nothing by the wind. Given that rover tracks were blown to nearly nothing within a year, this wouldn't be suprising.

Doug

Yes - one would assume such things drop off at a rate dictated by where you draw a vertical line on a bell curve, and as the total ammount decreases, so does the ammount above the line...perhaps that was already figured into their calculations though?

Doug

Yup - almost certainly - we can see several from orbit as well.

Doug

It may be true of course, and I think LORRI is a narrower FOV than either of the CICLOPS pair - but of course comparing JPGs with PDS IMG's isn't a true comparison.

Hopefully John or Alan will comment.

Doug