Lunar Spacecraft Images, A place for moon panoramas, mosaics etc. Options

[Phil Stooke]

As promised in another thread... I thought all the images from Surveyor, Apollo etc. needed another place to go than the Mars Forum.

I will start the thing off with a link, not an image. I occasionally have images in Chuck Wood's Lunar Picture of the Day (LPOD) website, www.lpod.org.

This URL:

http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2005-05-25.htm

is my latest, a Clementine LWIR mosaic. The text accompanying the image explains how I made it. LWIR images from the PDS look useless but they can be made into very nice image strips. In most areas of the Moon they are the highest resolution images available, since the HIRES camera only functioned well over near-polar latitudes. So image junkies who want to see new scenery emerge from their computers can go wild!

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

OK, here's the comparison...



I have chosen a small area on the NW rim of Cassini, chosen to give better Clementine coverage from the north periapsis images, with higher resolution in this area.

Lunar Orbiter 4: the new digital version from USGS.

Clementine - from map-a-planet, not raw data which would be a bit better. But I've spent too long on this as it is!

SMART-1 doesn't have the resolution of either of the others... but don't forget that this is jpegged and probably reduced from the original, which might be a bit better. More importantly, though, we are at 40 north, and SMART-1 's orbit is optimised for southern hemisphere viewing. At 40 south the resolution probably exceeds LO4 and Clementine UVVIS, and at 90 south it will be 10x better than LO4 and as good as Clementine HIRES. Plus it's got better lighting than Clem for morphological studies and will have better global coverage than Lunar Orbiter.

Phil

[Bob Shaw]

The problem I have with both SMART-1 and Mars Express isn't so much the quality of the data, so much as the *quantity*. ESA's miserly approach to image release compares s-o-o-o unfavourably with the situation in the US!

(sigh)