LightSail 2, Planetary Society solar sail mission Options

[nprev]

We are now just over 24 hours away from the beginning of the launch window for the third Falcon 9 Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, which among other payloads wlll carry The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. We'll talk about it here.


GO LIGHTSAIL!!! GO TPS!!!

[atomoid]

i remember the efforts to get this going in the 90s, its been such a long time coming, but finally here it is!
they put together a cool gif anim of the unfurling sails

images look much better than i expected, all raw images are here

[elakdawalla]

i remember the efforts to get this going in the 90s, its been such a long time coming, but finally here it is!
they put together a cool gif anim of the unfurling sails
images look much better than i expected, all raw images are here

Thanks, that gif is mine

Please have fun with the image data! The pictures are a lot better than I expected, too. I'm curious to see creative approaches to dealing with the bizarre wide-angle camera distortion. My approach is simply to enlarge the original photo by a factor of 5 or so, then apply the Photoshop geometric correction filter at its maximum level multiple times, then downsize to 2x original resolution. I don't find that sharpening the resulting image helps much, but I suspect I'm just not picking the right set of parameters.