LRO development Options

[jamescanvin]

Just read this interesting article about LRO

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28apr_lro.htm

"This is the first in a string of missions," says Gordon Chin, project scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "More robots will follow, about one per year, leading up to manned flight" no later than 2020."

One per Year? Is this just wishful thinking or have any tentitve plans been mentioned for follow up missions after LRO? If the next one is going to be 2009/10 then I guess some desisions about it will have to be made fairly soon.

James

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

[attachment=7296:attachment]

You can convert the measured spectral reflectivity of planets into CIE XYZ, and from there into gamma-corrected sRGB 24-bit colors. In my "planetary paint-chip" image above, I adjusted the Y values to be proportional to the albedos of the objects.

[ugordan]

You can convert the measured spectral reflectivity of planets into CIE XYZ, and from there into gamma-corrected sRGB 24-bit colors. In my "planetary paint-chip" image above, I adjusted the Y values to be proportional to the albedos of the objects.

Very interesting. Did you use average spectra of the objects, that is does Saturn's color include both the rings and the planet itself? Hence the color Saturn reduced to a point source would have, just as Saturn appears in the night sky?

EDIT: When you say gamma-corrected, do you mean compensating for the CRT 2.2 gamma or something else? I'm having trouble getting a grasp just what gamma value should be set, when converting linear-light images for viewing on monitors, escpecially not knowing whether the LUT in the video card's RAMDAC already takes care of that. Most modern video card drivers do allow setting the gamma manually, but I'm uncertain whether this is just applying another one on top of the 0.45 gamma.

BTW, here's a nice page about the subtle colors of the moon: http://www.colormoon.pt.to/

[paxdan]

Saturated Colour Photo of the Moon

exposure details

This image is a mosaic of 15 separate and slightly overlapping 8.2 megapixel images from my Canon EOS-20D (unmodified), taken in Raw mode and converted and stitched together in Photoshop CS2. As you can see from the EXIF data, the exposures were each 1/5 second at ISO 100.

Though the moon is generally made of gray, dusty material it is very bright, photographically, since it is bathed in sunlight.

I mounted my 20D to my Meade LX200 GPS UHTC 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope via my 2x Televue Powermate (a focal length doubler, similar to a teleconverter, which also serves to mate my camera to the 2" telescope eyepiece tube). Effective focal length was 5000mm f/20.

Looking through the viewfinder I swept across the surface in a zig-zag fashion, trying for about 1/3 overlap between frames. I triggered the shutter with my TC80-N3 remote timer/controller. I did the stitching by hand in Photoshop.

Since it is tremendously downsized from the original mosaic, which was almost 40 megapixels, and was taken at the camera's most noise-free setting (ISO 100), the data is very accurate, and thus I was able to strongly increase the saturation via Photoshop's Image - Adjust - Hue/Saturation function.



Somebody send this guy an invite to UMSF that is truely a stunning image and an impressive bit of processing.

[ugordan]

Somebody send this guy an invite to UMSF that is truely a stunning image and an impressive bit of processing.

Indeed. Good equipment doesn't hurt, either.