For those of you that got in early, note that i've adjusted the brightness and contrast a bit since posting this earlier.

James

Sol 716 - 6 pointing L257 pan of Allegheny Ridge.



Click image.

James

I'm guessing this is a shot of the IDD in the process of "unstowing" after taking those MI's (40mins later) and not the actual "stowed" position .



Brightened version of this

No mention of any 'look back' imagery.

Is any planned?



James

Good luck Dan.

I'm looking forward to your pics

James

And to hopefully clear things up even more. The edge of the feature the Shaka put a ? on is the rise going off the left edge of Alans picture.

No point in in trying to make my own version of this one. Fantastic work Doug!


What an amazing place, no abyss, but still .


James

Well I now know what I'm going to do right after catching up on UMSF, I hate to think about how much I've done since my last backup.

Just to Join the chorus: Happy birthday Doug! Have a great 28th year, I'm 3/4 of the way through mine, and I think it's the best one I've had, hope yours is too!

Cheers,

James

P.S. Awsome cake Helen!

Sorry, ignore. I was being silly.

Three new wavelengths, filters in the right eye are different, could be useful.

Looks like they are running out of things to do here!

How in gods name did you notice that!? Took me some time to find it even though I new I should be looking for it. Me thinks your spending too much time looking at this stuff, time for 'MER imagery anonymous', for you.

It's is going to be a nightmare once the kooks get hold of this one!

Ah, yes, sorry didn't notice ermar's second link (it's been a long day)

Thanks for the poster, very useful.

Looks like a crater to me.. maybe with some kind of, err, abyss! It's hard to tell for sure.

James

I didn't see one on the page linked by imram but the BBC has a picture.

I hope they have a 'before' shot, else I'm going to be more than a little skeptical.

James

Nice find!

Shows how nice and sparkly and clean Spirits panels still are.

Another nice polar veiw dilo, glad it will make it into your fabulous route map.

I use Hugin to do the stiching. All the brightness and colour matching however is done using a home grown program and using the Hugin save file to work out which edges join up.



Your welcome. After all, the raw images are jpg's, so there really is very little difference in image quality between the ~10Mb full resolution lightly jpeged image and the 200Mb raw tiff file that comes out of the sticher!


James

Erebus 360 pan in colour:



Click image.

There are a few brightness problems, I think my program is getting confused with the large areas of light outcrop vs the dark ripples. Either that or there were some fluffy clouds going over, causing shadows!

I also haven't attempted to add in any of the images of the near field from the deck pan (al-a jvandriel's b/w pan) which I'm pretty sure would break my program as it currently stands, so you'll have to make do with 'just' the 27x3!

Enjoy,

James

It's a pre-print server - and no I don't think you need to be affiliated with anywhere to submit to it. If you do write this stuff up (and I think you should) you should think about submitting it to a proper peer reviewed journal as well.

James

Edit: Actually maybe you do need affiliation, I'm not so sure after a quick look at some of the submission pages...

That was the largest hailstone I beleve.

Although I think the record was broken a few years back - and anyway it looks like it's only a US record anyway.

See for example:

http://weathersavvy.com/Q-Hail1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hail

From those missions you list?

What about Mars Express, Huygens, SMART-1, Envisat, Giotto... I could go on.

Not quite zero results!

For those of you who might not have noticed (it's been so long you might not be checking any more!)

Steve has a new update

You won't see any tracks as, as Phil said this is made using the first of the two pans made before Oppy entered Endurance.

This being Phils work I would be fairly sure that North is up.

Didn't Oppy enter Endurance from the west side? Burns cliff and 'escape hatch' are are on the south side.

Sure, but then I'd hate to have an end of mission period!

However Oppy may or may not get to Victoria whether we race off now or not, it's still a long way away. I'd rather see Oppy die on the way to Victoria while collecting lots of useful data than die while racing to get there ignoring all targets in between. Like always, the MER team have to work with the assumption that the rovers may not wake up tommorrow. Putting all our scientific eggs in one distant crater is risky and silly.

There is going to be lots to see in the etched terrain and I hope that there is enough life lefted in the IDD to get it into a useful position to look at it. If the best chance of getting that is to wait here a few more weeks while the best method is worked out, then that's what must be done. The IDD is way to important to give up on so quickly.

James

Here, Here.

So far they have done exactly what I would have expected and hoped they would do in a situation like this. The IDD is a very important piece of the rover, especially on Oppy given such fine layering and that the RAT still works. The top priorities right now must be to:

1) make sure they don't make the problem worse - driving without the arm properly stowed could do that.
2) Find the problem and identify the best solution - fix it, try to extend it into a useful position, try and stow it.

Only then can we get on with other things like driving.

Thanks for the complements guys, glad you liked it.

Wonderful projection dilo (as always), a great way to look at 360's.

Nico, about processing times: We probably process the pans in very different ways and on very different hardware so it's going to be hard to compare. However the one thing that took an inordinate amount of time for this pan was running the program 'enblend' to smooth out any tiny seams between images. For this pan it took around 20 hours! (1.67GHz G4 PowerBook with 512Mb RAM) The poor thing! It runs hot enough at the best of times (one of the reasons Apple are switching to Intel) but the weather was HOT here on Tuesday as well (100F/39C).

James