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

[nprev]

But it's a bit of a mess. Surveyor was quickly overshadowed by Apollo and people lost interest - of course, there wasn't an amateur image processing community in those days.

Phil

What an incredible shame...but also a call to arms for all you imagesmiths out there. I wonder if NASA would react favorably to an organized amateur (and, boy do I use that term loosely here) effort to digitally preserve images from the first Golden Age of UMSF?

[Phil Stooke]

I made this map for another purpose, but just in case it might be useful for anybody else - outreach or education, whatever - I'll post it here. The background is the old US Air Force (ACIC) Lunar Earthside Mosaic (LEM), a classic of lunar cartography in its own right. This time next year we should have two new sites to plot on it - both very near the south pole (LCROSS and Chandrayaan's MIP - Moon Impact Probe). I have not shown everything - could have added a few Lunas, the Apollo LMs and SIVBs, two failed Surveyors... but I chose what I deemed the most significant. A bigger version with everything is in the works.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a blast from the past. The horizon portion of the "Picture of the Century" (never call an image that until the last month of the century!), the mountains north of Copernicus viewed by Lunar Orbiter 2. Nasty processing artifacts are not my fault this time.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

I should have added hat these mountains are the Carpathians (Montes Carpatus). On Earth the Carpathians cross Romania, so the Romanian team in the Google Lunar X Prize is planning to land on the mare plains just to the north of them, able to look back at the other side of these mountains.

Phil

[jekbradbury]

I think I have removed a few of the worst artifacts from that image (the horizontal banding), but it isn't really all that much better:

[tedstryk]

Here is a compilation of relatively recent lunar images (the last decade or so) from spacecraft heading to other places. I only included global views, and I excluded views with orientations similar to that seen from earth (with the exception of the Cassini view because I had already processed it). I also left out some extremely distant images. Due to the lack of Rosetta raw data, Rosetta images are not included (I see absolutely no point in wasting my time trying to reprocess processed images when the raw stuff will be available sooner or later, rendering my effort moot).

The images are as follows: First Column: Top: Nozomi, 1998. Middle: Nozomi, 1998. Bottom: Messenger, 2005. Second Column: Cassini, 1999. Middle: NEAR, 1998. Bottom: Hayabusa, 2004. Third column: Top: Deep Impact, 2005. Middle and Bottom: Stardust, 2001.

[Decepticon]

T you Rock!

Thats a keeper.

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, a great job, Ted. I don't think I've seen all of them before. Now I have to go back and check.

Phil

[tedstryk]

The NEAR image is the one from the famous Earth-Moon mosaic. I just stacked images until I could pull out some lunar detail.

[ilbasso]

Beautiful images, Ted. I'm struck by how unfamiliar - and downright alien - our Moon can look when viewed from a different perspective than the one we see every day.

For me, this disconnect or disorientation comes from seeing the Moon as an entire disk. It almost looks like a different place, especially in the far side shots where few or none of the familiar craters and maria are visible. From an up-close perspective like Apollo had from orbit, I'm mentally willing to accept that the craters and mountains I see are indeed our Moon. But from farther away, where it's obviously a "world," I get a sense that I'm looking at something else other than good ol' Luna. The far side somehow doesn't look as "beautiful" as the near side.

Maybe my 51+ years of looking at it, most of those years as an amateur astronomer, have helped me feel like I know the near side almost like the back of my hand. I imagine most of you are like me, that whenever we see a photo of the Moon on TV or in a movie, can tell immediately when the image is reversed, or that they substitute one of the Apollo full-disk shots that shows too far around the eastern limb.

If I were to wish one perspective change that we have for the Moon, it's that Mare Orientale would be facing more toward Earth! Wouldn't that be a glorious sight to behold every month?!

[tedstryk]

The lack of maria gives it an utterly different appearance. I agree that it seems unfamiliar. Also, as a consequence of the basins not being as fully flooded, it looks more rugged.

[tedstryk]

Here is another rarely seen shot. It is a mosaic of three Apollo 17 35 millimeter shots and shows part of the Orientale Basin. The frames are heavily vignetted, resulting in the outer areas of each image being severely underexposed. Although I corrected for that in terms of brightness, the quality is noticeably worse near the edges.



Here are two other frames showing the Orientale area.

[tedstryk]

It is today's LPOD.

[nprev]

Very nice indeed, Ted; congratulations!

[Phil Stooke]

A bit of a teaser:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26900

"NASA will hold a media briefing at 3 p.m. PST on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008, to unveil a newly restored historic image from the early days of lunar exploration and discuss the innovative processing technique used to retrieve the image. "


I see Charles Byrne is a speaker. He has a couple of nice books out on cleaned-up Lunar Orbiter images. Charles worked at Bellcomm during Apollo, including work on the Lunar Orbiter missions and on the Apollo Site Selection Board - he wrote their minutes, which are held now at LPI in Houston. I had dinner with him one night at Ames this summer... I'm trying to remember if he said anything that might relate to this specific image... it's probably one of the Lunar Orbiter images that was too messed up to use.

Phil