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]

My work with Surveyor pans is very tedious and time-consuming. I told myself five years ago I would make a full clean pan of every Surveyor site. Now I tell myself I will never look at another Surveyor image as long as I live.

I work in Photoshop. In the better areas I can just select small areas and lighten or darken them. In general, though, the procedure is like this:

I use the polygon select tool to outline one individual frame from the pan. I copy it and paste it over itself.

I use feathered selections over dark areas to brighten them, and over light areas to darken them, adjusting to equalize contrast in each area as well. This removes the vile tonal gradients across many of the frames.

Then - the slowest part - I zoom in on the frame borders and clean up all the bad edges so the transition from frame to frame is invisible. Many small selections individually processed.

Finally, I remove reseau marks and other defects using a comination of noise filters in tiny selections over each flaw, and (less often) cutting an adjacent good patch and placing it over a larger flaw (dust specks on Surveyor 6 mirror, for instance).

Then I flatten it, back it up, and start all over again.

Phil