Assembling Voyager movies Options

[Brian Burns]

Hello,

I'm a bit new here - I recently started on a project which I thought would be fun, to assemble movies of all the Voyager flybys. Of course, with 70k+ images, it would have to be automated as much as possible, and the results would be fairly crude. But there's enough information to make some rough black and white and color movies with one segment per target, and eventually combine them all into one movie.

The main task is getting the images properly centered, since the cameras don't point right at the target - there are still some jitters at the moment, so it needs some more stabilization. But in any case, here are some slightly bumpy rides along with Voyager - these are from versions 0.3-0.34 -

Ariel (Uranus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeGgH34v8R4

Uranus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLGadmvc40

Neptune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlU2_NOgoew

Assembling a color movie is a matter of combining the images that seem to go together (since it's not explicit in the data) - this is a first attempt at that. There are frames that lack certain channels, so colors are pretty off at points - later it could borrow a nearby image when a channel is missing.

Neptune, colorized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8O2BKqM0Qc

The goal is to generate the movies with as little manual annotation as possible - there are parts that need it though, like handling images with multiple targets, slowing down the movie at certain points, and turning off the centering at closest approach.

Anyway, just wanted to share what I've got so far - hopefully one day it will be able to make a nice, stable movie of all the flybys, with some appropriate music. Once the code is a little more stable I'll post the project on GitHub - it's written in Python with OpenCV, SciPy, and IMG2PNG.

-Brian

[Brian Burns]

Here are some color Uranus movies - eventually I'd like to merge the narrow and wide angle images to make a more complete movie - the wide angle version has some nice shots of the moons in orbit and the rings. These are version 0.36 - they need more stabilization and filling in of missing color channels.

Uranus narrow angle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DReYpMJ98G0

Uranus wide angle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnvzx7xNNrI

This time YouTube posted the wide angle movie in HD, so you can see the moons a little more clearly.

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So far I've only looked at Voyager 1 at Jupiter, and Voyager 2 at Neptune and Uranus. The Jupiter flyby has some nice movies of the moons that will need some work, especially manually aligning the color closeups, e.g. of Ganymede - right now it just slows down at closest approach and shows all the images in b&w.

Edit: Not sure about merging the narrow and wide angle movies - it would sort of work for Uranus because it's so featureless, but not any other target.