Because the matter is absolute. Fact.

You could be the most intelligent person on earth, but you cant get from those JPG's to any sort of calibrated product. End of story.

Sorry to be so blunt about it - but there are too many people claiming to do 'real' colour images using the JPL JPG's online, and it's missleading and uninformed to do so.

Doug

All we actually need is an l/p to the recent data on the workbook

Doug

Wow - nice one guys !!

Yes - they all get stretched to hell and back. Basically, it's like the 'auto-levels' function in photoshop - and once you have an image, you have no means whatsoever of converting it back. Not to mention the conversion from 12 bit to 8 bit, and heavy JPG compression.

It's not just exposure and stretching, it's all the other calibration that goes on ( flatfield, dark field, exposure, temperature etc etc etc ) that we only get with the PDS releases as well.

Doug

Doing the same for the Wild 2 flyby, looking at the data, the quality of the imaging was not great - but here it is

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...ardust_wild.gif

Yup - start and end are very dark, BUT, that's about as much as I can do without ruining those other images

What I'm going to try and do is pull a photoshop action together that combines the pairs of images ( long and short exposure ) to show the comet and the coma jets at the same time, much like one or two press images, but the whole way thru

Doug

Well - take the Realspacemodels Kit - and add 100 hours of build time onto it.....I can see why he could come up with that figure, I've had a few Realspacemodel kits and they are VERY hard work - but beautiful results

Doug

To quote senior Nasa management during the pre-launch-MER-panic

"I think it'd look pretty damn good in the Smithsonian"



Doug

You're using the JPG's from Erebus I assume - and that's a fundamental barrier in making any spectral claims. It can not be done. You can fudge them to make pretty pictures, you can measure how far things are apart, but you can NOT under any circumstances, using any magical technique, use the raw JPG's to make any claims as to the spectral properties - even in just a relative sense - of anything imaged.

Doug

If you cant quite make it out, then give me time-brackets and I'll go over it as...well...I was there

Doug

I've only ever seen one image from the Anne Frank Flyby :

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02885


And to be honest, I thought 'there must be more - where's the flyby movie?' - only to find nothing....so I hit the PDS and came up with this..

about 500kb
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im..._anne_frank.gif

I thought at first that the flickering toward the end might be the use of different filters, but checking the IMG headers, it's not - so the Filter wheel must have stuck before this flyby.

Thanks to Bjorn for fixing his img2png tool to work with Stardust imagery - MUCH appreciated Bjorn !!!

I'm going to see if there's anything to be had in terms of super-res with this lot (doubt it) - and then try Wild 2 imagery - the only movie available is a rather poor - http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/images/w2_flyby1.gif

Doug

I dont think it's Odyssey in that image as one of those two streaks - they can be seen moving quite slowly in the preceeding frames along with many other objects, suggesting they're bright stars or perhaps even planets. It would be a cool observation to see Odyssey - BUT - it's at a 4am / 4pm orbit, and so it either, I imagine, in full sun during the day, or eclipsed at night - but perhaps there's some overlap - I dont know

However, it may be that they just scheduled some imaging in conjunction with Odyssey, and not some imaging OF Odyssey


Doug

Paxdan's doing 3

Wow - sweet - I go to bed for 8 hours, and 1/6th of it's done

Doug

A few people have offered to help transcribe the Steve Q'n'A MP3

http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_030905.mp3

So - I've 'chopped' it up into about a dozen virtual sections each somewhere between 3 and 6 mins long, and if volunteers want to pick one, post here and then post the finished text when done and I'll string it all together as a PDF when it's done

Section 01 :: 00.00 to 03.36 :: Intro and Mars '01
Section 02 :: 03.37 to 07.29 :: Endurance and Wopmay
Section 03 :: 07.30 to 10.41 :: Burns Cliff and Leaving Endurance
Section 04 :: 10.42 to 14.33 :: Heading South and Purgatory
Section 05 :: 14.34 to 19.00 :: Gusev and Rock Types
Section 06 :: 19.01 to 24.53 :: DD's and Rover Rocking
Section 07 :: 24.54 to 29.10 :: Ultreya and Leaving Husband Hill
Section 08 :: 29.11 to 33.48 :: MB Decay and Rover Life
Section 09 :: 33.49 to 38.32 :: Sci vs Eng and A parked rover
Section 10 :: 38.33 to 43.00 :: What should you be doing?
Section 11 :: 43.00 to 47.16 :: S1K, New PI, Other Landing sites, Carl
Section 12 :: 47.17 to 50.09 :: Outreach, Book Follow up, Thankyou

Green = Transcription Done

Pick whichever you want, and post here the moment you decide, so we dont end up duplicating If I get some time, I'll take a couple and plough thru them. It would be nice to wrap it all into a little PDF article with pictures etc - like an extract from a pretend UMSF Journal or some such publication - and if I'm fortunate enough to do something like this again, I could do it the same way

Thanks in advance to everyone who grabs a number out the hat.

Doug

I'm sure people better informed than myself will be able to tell you - but as I understand it - the spacecraft essentially 'paints' that pattern onto the surface by slewing left and right in 4 stripes during closest approach.

Doug

Moons tend to orbit their parent planet in the same direction as the planets rotation - so were a moon to colide with its parent planet, the likely impact would be an increase in rotation I'd have thought.

Perhaps it's a symptom of planet formation closer to the centre of the protoplanetary disk - further out from the sun, the local gravity from chunks of whatever is the major force, but closer in, the suns gravity is dominant.

It's a complex process, that's for sure.


Doug

As I understand it - the RTG is a mass model - i.e. it's not the real thing, it's just there to act the same - and it might well be a few years old, perhaps borrowed from the spares-cupboard of a past mission?

Doug

We disagree on the pros and cons of bolting messages onto spacecraft - but that's an opinion issue.

However it is outside the realm of opinion and simply a matter of what is or is not possible. It is TOO LATE to put something on NH.

Doug

Lots of images from the press day
http://www.launchphotography.com/NewHorizonsProcessing.html

Doug

Wow - a lot cheaper than the one that was around a year or so ago - that was almost $100. Looks very nearly as good as well


Doug

Yup - got that email - one of god-knows-how-many I got in only 4 days A.F.K. in London

I'm going to start a thread about it etc. tonight and find appropriate in-out points for say, 12 sections, then people can pick one or more sections to transcribe, and I can produce a nicely formatted PDF with the results

Doug

Yup - the limit is, and will remain 1 Mb.

90% of the site bandwidth goes on attachments, and whilst we remain well under the monthly limit for bandwidth, that pattern wont be maintained if I allow larger attachments. Worse that that is the storage of attachments, currently standing at many hundreds of files, totaling 630Mbytes. A big storage problem in itself, but backing it up is even more so. (can you imagine re-uploading 630 Mbytes of attachments at 25 kb/sec )

Furthermore, the larger the image, the more server CPU time it takes to resize them for thumbnails on each post.

I think 1Mb is plenty, given my responsibility to ensure the long term life and reliability of this place, if people want to post something larger, then almost all ISP's offer some web-space of some sort, and there are the free online image hosting firms etc. 25 Meg attachments would be lovely, but the place would be dead within a fortnight. It's an evil, but a very necessary one.

Doug

The west-coast-bound-card has arrived, Shardon Laubach (MER Engineer who worked on auto-nav algos etc) emailed to let me know.

The real question is..can the Science team hold out till the actual birthday before opening the card

Doug

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1367

Much as I would like to transcribe it, it would take days and days and days - and I just dont have the time.

Doug