Tedstryk love your work.


That's a keeper!

Very nice images. The colors are very realistic!

Thanks. I left this image out, but I thought I would post it for the heck of it. It is a super-res view I made of Saturn and Titan from C22 orbit data from Galileo, taken as a calibration exercise. The data is really noisy, which, despite cleanup efforts, led to a bit of a lumpy appearance. The color was generated from red and infrared data, which is why it looks a bit odd. Titan was artificially brightened.

Nice surprise!

It looks almost the same as a Saturn image taken from Earth using a small 4 inch telescope and a webcam. :-)

Yes, it does The only difference is that the phase angle is a bit different than one could get from earth.

Two datasets I plan to work with are Triton and Titania. Voyager got some remarkably good coverage at Triton despite a quick flyby and camera limitations caused by long exposures and spacecraft motion. I hope to improve some global views, and do some super-res work where possible with the highres images. The closeup in my earlier post improved slightly from the better of the two images, but not much. In the closeups, it is rare to find overlap between two or more unsmeared images of an area not covered by higher resolution images, but if I find any, I will go to work. Also, I hope that eventually I can reproject and mosaic the images of the receeding crescent to make an interperetable view of the surface features. That is the closest we will come for a long time at seeing a new part of Triton close up.
I stacked the two closest Titania images with good results. There are several other good Titania sets that I might get some nice images out of - I think they alocated more images to Titania during the time leading up to closest approach using the theory that as the largest it would be most interesting. The best Oberion set is a four-color multispectral set, so it might improve as well. There is an ariel color set that captures roughly the bottom half of the disk seem in the typically-used mosaics. However, there is so much smear in some of the images that I don't think I can improve on what has been done.

Your Titania image from the previous page looks pretty nice. I've recently added maps of
the 5 major Uranian satelllites, as well as Triton, to my Planetary Maps web site. These are
datasets used for the Science on a Sphere project I'm working on. I may be interested (with your
permission) of using your Titania image to blend in with my map, as well as some of the other
satellites you mention. Would that be a possibility?

Yes, this Saturn image is taken from a "left" point of view

I hope you'll get excelent images of those satellites!

Sure! If you give me an e-mail address, I can send you the TIFF version, free of JPEG artifacts. Feel free to use anything of mine for the maps, but it would be best to contact me so I can send you the TIFF files.

Ted:

Very nice Voyager images!

I wonder whether any of the Mariner 6 and 7 far-encounter images can be similarly treated?

Bob Shaw

I doubt they are good enough quality since they were analogue. I also don't know if, other than a very few sets, there are any that have similar enough geometry. It is something I will look in to.

JPL made a global map mosaic of Mariner 6 and/or 7 images. The effort for computers at that time was too great for them to attempt any sort of "image quality weighted average" to blend the overlap between images together and make a seamless mosaic. It's been rarely, if ever, reproduced since about 1970.

Note that Rosetta will make a gravity assist flyby of Mars. They really should be able to get a spectacular Mars Rotation Movie on the approach and/or the flyaway.

There are two Web sites online that this group may find useful:

The 1968 NASA classic Exploring Space with a Camera:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/sp168.htm


And this site has loads of online NASA documents:

http://www.geocities.com/bobandrepont/unmannedpdf.htm

I am a major longtime "fan" of the early space probes, especially Surveyor and Pioneer.

Speaking of the latter, is there any kind of a history on the early Pioneer lunar probes, especially those ones launched in 1959 and 1960 that barely even made it off the ground? Images would also be great, thanks.

That book is one that I have a copy of and am quite fond of. As for the geocities site, great find too! It make sense of a NASA online archive (which all the lists are just links to - http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/ ) The NASA site is almost incomprehensible, so this really helps.

"Exploring Space with a Camera" by Edgar M Cortright was widely distributed and shows up used quite frequently.

A quick check on www.abebooks.com <advanced book exchange> shows 265 copies for sale, starting at $1.00 and going up to $200 for an edition signed by astronaut Charles Duke.

edstrick, the global mosaic of Mariner images of Mars that you mentioned was Mariner 9. Well, presumably... Mariners 6 and 7 imaged restricted areas, and of course mosaics were made... and they imaged the whole planet at a distance and mosaics of those images could have been made... but for Mariner 9 a big globe at JPL was covered with images to create a global mosaic - that's what i assume you were referring to. I have a JPL booklet describing it with lots of illustrations.

Phil