Apollo Image Products., Various mosaics, composites and other imagery. Options

[Ian R]

I've decided to start a new thread dedicated to the Apollo program, and I shall start the ball rolling by posting an assortment of mosaics and other images that I have been working on during the past few months.

LM ASCENT MOSAICS:

Apollo 14:



Turtle Rock and Station H are clearly visible, as are the tracks leading up to the ALSEP. Compare to the lunar orbiter view:

[DDAVIS]

I have taken my unusually 'clean' VHS Apollo 11 video copy, recorded during a 20 year anniversary broadcast of the NBC coverage, and merged sets of similar frames together to reduce the video noise, horizontal wavering of detail etc. The resulting frames were then mosaiced into a panorama from near the final camera position with added black sky. A moment when the TV camera exposure dropped dramatically as a white space suit passed nearby allowed a peek at the overexposed sunlit LM details, which were composited in. This provides a modest sample of what could be done with the original data, if it exists.

[Airbag]

Nice "time averaging" composite!

This thread reminded me that the picture some posts above of a dirty, tired but obviously very satisfied Gene Cernan is one of my favorite Apollo program images. I think it sums up the program very well. And a nice surprise that it could be mosaiced with the one of the stowed helmets and lunar garments.

Airbag

[4th rock from th...]

Great processing on those Apollo 11 tv images. I'd like to see another version with the astronauts, just for scale and perspective. If they stay still for some time I guess frame averaging would reduce noise to an acceptable level.

One thing I'd like to do (although I don't know any software that would allow it) is to process the color video from latter missions restoring the original full 60fps of the camera (in black and white). This could be made by "splitting" the color data. The color data is just 20fps, because for each frame a different filter was used (so 60/3 = 20 fps). So for each normal frame of color video you can get the original 3 bw frames with full motion information. In practice this would be hard to do, but I think that the results might be very interesting.