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Posted by: dilo Apr 30 2005, 06:15 PM

Only today I discovered these news:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEMLWGW797E_0.html
Images quality is very poor, I tried to improved a little bit throug jpeg artifact removal and dynamic range corrections :
http://img49.echo.cx/my.php?image=northpole29dec4cleare6kx.jpg
http://img31.echo.cx/my.php?image=lunarpeak19jan5clearbale0wc.jpg

Posted by: Bob Shaw Apr 30 2005, 10:17 PM

(Sigh)

Great pix, but why oh why are ESA so incredibly bad at releasing the things? SMART-1 is *allegedly* taking all sorts of images (albeit at relatively low resolution) but it's easier to find forty year old pictures of Mars than current data from the Moon. Surely, the exemplary approach of the US agencies wouldn't be too much of an act to follow - think of the Mars orbiters, NEAR, MER and Cassini, and then think of the paucity of ESA material...

Posted by: dilo May 1 2005, 05:37 AM

(Sigh)

Great pix, but why oh why are ESA so incredibly bad at releasing the things?  SMART-1 is *allegedly* taking all sorts of images (albeit at relatively low resolution) but it's easier to find forty year old pictures of Mars than current data from the Moon.  Surely, the exemplary approach of the US agencies wouldn't be too much of an act to follow - think of the Mars orbiters, NEAR, MER and Cassini, and then think of the paucity of ESA material...

Posted by: edstrick May 1 2005, 08:31 AM

So far, I'm decidedly underwhelmed by the quality of Smart-1's images. Granted the mission is a major engineering test and a successful one, like Deep-Space-1, but the camera -- at least in what I think are raw data, and if so, why not preliminary decalibrated data -- doesn't seem to be really clean of noise and especially scattered light.

The posting I saw of the north polar region a week ago <one of these same images> was saturated on most of the sun-facing slopes, but the picture data level was well below 255, and the shadow areas were well above 0, and transitions were not all that sharp or crisp.

I don't expect that camera, from what I've seen to really do much significant new lunar science. Nice tourist shots, but....

I hope I'm wrong.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 1 2005, 01:57 PM

I'm perfectly prepared to ride Tourist Class if that's all that's available!