Hst 1990, That famous image... Options

[David]

Gee,  I always liked Percival Lowell's view:

Dig those canals.  And this final view:

I can't believe all those hours he wasted at the Clark telescope. One is struck by the ugliness of Lowell's maps, an aesthetic deficit in no way compensated by scientific accuracy. Lowell's draughtsmanship is atrocious and the acuity of his observations no better than those of his contemporaries and precursors, not to mention all the things he saw that weren't there.

[Bob Shaw]

I can't believe all those hours he wasted at the Clark telescope.  One is struck by the ugliness of Lowell's maps, an aesthetic deficit in no way compensated by scientific accuracy.  Lowell's draughtsmanship is atrocious and the acuity of his observations no better than those of his contemporaries and precursors, not to mention all the things he saw that weren't there.

David:

No, he was a fine, fine observer, who always reported just what he saw.

It's just the deconvolving program he used went a bit overboard and had to be shot with a .JPG Compressor before it would lie down. Helluva mess, there was data leaking out all over the place, but that's what you get with lossy algorithms...

...honest!

Bob Shaw

[DDAVIS]

[quote=David,Dec 19 2005, 08:30 PM]
I can't believe all those hours he wasted at the Clark telescope. One is struck by the ugliness of Lowell's maps, an aesthetic deficit in no way compensated by scientific accuracy. Lowell's draughtsmanship is atrocious and the acuity of his observations no better than those of his contemporaries and precursors, not to mention all the things he saw that weren't there.

While his maps do show extreme tendecies toward resolving every ambiguity as a liniar feature, his placements of the major dark areas aren't that bad. If one who is nearsighted (as I am) looks at a defocused version of his and other disk drawings showing canals, so that the lines are just no longer easily seen, one can almost imagine something of the original view.

[tedstryk]

Here are two things that I have been working on. The first is a UV (2 image composite) image of Mars from 2003 from STIS on Hubble.



The second is my attempt to clean up Robert Leighton's 1956 image of Mars from Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1956. This is, to my knowledge, the best pre-space age groundbased color image of Mars.

[edstrick]

tedstryk: "The second is my attempt to clean up Robert Leighton's 1956 image of Mars from Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1956. "

I utterly agree that that's the best pre-space-age color image of Mars. Did you scan that from Slipher's book "Mars, The photographic Story" or what? My copy is one of the special copies with an actual glued-in photographic print of one of the plates in an attempt to convince readers it was capturing fine linear details that proved canals existed. (It didn't convince me...)

[tedstryk]

tedstryk: "The second is my attempt to clean up Robert Leighton's 1956 image of Mars from Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1956. "

I utterly agree that that's the best pre-space-age color image of Mars.  Did you scan that from Slipher's book "Mars, The photographic Story" or what?  My copy is one of the special copies with an actual glued-in photographic print of one of the plates in an attempt to convince readers it was capturing fine linear details that proved canals existed.  (It didn't convince me...)

Yes, it is. Fortunately, it is so rediculously blown up that the printing cost the image little when reduced down to a sane size.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Dr Robert Leighton really did some pioneering work when talking of making color images of the planets.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/rleighton.html