Pioneer 11 Jupiter, Cylindrical Maps Options

[4th rock from th...]

Hi,

I'm working on the Pioneer Jupiter images and I'd like to share this with you. It's a rough cylindrical mosaic of Jupiter.

Even working from imagens scanned from paper modern processing can make wonders to old data!

[Decepticon]

WOW!

I like that!

[tedstryk]

Great work! I had a few Pioneer images in digital matrixes. I was about to release them before my crash. I had entered them manually. Someone (Bjorn I think) said they had a program that could scan the matrices and convert them to text. My original copies were too bad to scan, but I now have better copies. I would be willing to send the scans someone with the capability to convert them to images on the condition that they share the new "raw" images with me and allow me to process them too (they are also free to do what they want with them - it just took me literally hundreds of hours to find these, so I don't want to lose access). There is a red and blue pair of Saturn's rings, and there is a red channel image of the rings against the disk of Saturn.

Ted

[GregM]

.

[4th rock from th...]

The avaliable Pioneer scanned images are not that bad. I'll put them on my site when I have the time. I've been busy color correcting and resampling them to their aproximate original pixel sizes. I'm actually surprised that the images have so little noise, given that the original data is only 6 bits. For some I have individual Red and Blue channel images, that I used to make R(g)B images.

I don't thing that using real digital data would improve things much. Perhaps a good high quality scan of the printed images would do. There are some on the net and you can clearly see the original image pixels, meaning that all the information is preserved.

When I have the time I'll post more images.

[tedstryk]

The avaliable Pioneer scanned images are not that bad. I'll put them on my site when I have the time. I've been busy color correcting and resampling them to their aproximate original pixel sizes. I'm actually surprised that the images have so little noise, given that the original data is only 6 bits. For some I have individual Red and Blue channel images, that I used to make R(g)B images.

I don't thing that using real digital data would improve things much. Perhaps a good high quality scan of the printed images would do. There are some on the net and you can clearly see the original image pixels, meaning that all the information is preserved.

When I have the time I'll post more images.

I will tell you from my experience that it doesn't. For example, in my Io work, the digital image doesn't show much more than the scanned version - and a lot of the improvement could have been recreated had I simply restacked the scanned red and blue images rather than just scanning a color one.


The print versions are very good. I think a big reason that they appear so noise free is that the 6 bit format was used due to Pioneer's very limited data rate and the fact that all data had to be sent in real (or almost real - the Pioneers had a small amount of storage for data taken during planetary occultations) time. The IPP put out a signal that would have benefitted from a 7 or 8 bit format. Therefore, most noise (along with a lot of detail) was lost in the encoding.

[jrdahlman]

Ted, I'll volunteer to do the typing, if you can't find a scanning program. Since I know almost nothing about processing, I'd hand it right back to you once the file's digitized.

If you're interested, contact my email. (I just turned put it in my profile.) Maybe you could email a scan, or send Xeroxes. (For God's sake don't send any originals!)

Of course, since your hard drive committed suicide right after you loaded it, maybe the data's cursed.

(I was just about to order red & blue Pioneer negatives from the NSSDC, and here comes some digital data. NSSDC reprints go for $10 a pop. Each. Better have a good idea what you want to order!)

John D.

[tedstryk]

Ted, I'll volunteer to do the typing, if you can't find a scanning program. Since I know almost nothing about processing, I'd hand it right back to you once the file's digitized.

If you're interested, contact my email. (I just turned put it in my profile.) Maybe you could email a scan, or send Xeroxes. (For God's sake don't send any originals!)

Of course, since your hard drive committed suicide right after you loaded it, maybe the data's cursed.

(I was just about to order red & blue Pioneer negatives from the NSSDC, and here comes some digital data. NSSDC reprints go for $10 a pop. Each. Better have a good idea what you want to order!)

John D.

I am at work, so I don't have them now. I can type the numbers in as text. The issue is that the only way I have to convert that to an image is to create an indexed photoshop image and individually select each pixel, entering a value, which takes forever. I will get to work on this when I get home tonight.

[helvick]

I am at work, so I don't have them now. I can type the numbers in as text. The issue is that the only way I have to convert that to an image is to create an indexed photoshop image and individually select each pixel, entering a value, which takes forever. I will get to work on this when I get home tonight.

I've got a bunch of Perl scripts that will do this (and the reverse - pushing out pixel values into arrays\matrices). There is certainly no reason to do something as painful as this by hand if you have the data it will take me minutes at most provided the data is more or less coherent.

[jrdahlman]

Yeah, I was about to say, "WHAT?" Doesn't your program know about "raw" formats?

I had assumed I was going to type a text file, then write a quick program that would turn that into a binary stream of bytes. (Then take a quick look in Paint Shop Pro loading it as a raw.)

Heck, I bet you could load up a spreadsheet like Excel, fill in the cells with the numbers, and turn it into special 3D graph to view it directly. I KNOW you can do this in Mathcad from version 5 up: create a matrix, then display that matrix as a B/W contour plot.

John D.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Converting a simple text file containing numbers (e.g. one row for each image row) to something like PNG is trivial for me. In fact I already have a program I wrote for this purpose late last century when I was processing intensity profiles of Saturn's rings in text format.

Today I suddenly remembered that I have the Pioneer 11 Saturn special issue of JGR and it contains something interesting: Pages 5918-5919 contain a printed table of numbers for red and blue channel images of the rings. There is another smaller one (red channel only) on page 5920 showing the rings silhouetted against Saturn (Saturn's limb is also visible). I remember typing at least one of these into a computer ages ago but I cannot find it - I probably lost it ages ago when moving stuff between computers.

I wonder if these are the images Ted has in mind. This appeared in JGR vol. 85, no. A11 (November 1, 1980).

BTW there is a related thread here. Maybe these two threads should be merged...

Despite the comments above on the good quality of scanned images there's another reason for wanting this data in digital format: Getting *all* of the Pioneer images (the majority hasn't appeared in print). I have all of the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini images and my collection of outer solar system spacecraft images isn't complete without the Pioneer images .

[tedstryk]

Yes, I do have those. Here are scans of them.

[djellison]

wow - reminds me of this
http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/IMAGES/MEDIUM/GPN-2003-00060.jpg

Doug

[ljk4-1]

Appendix 2 of the NASA publication Pioneer Odyssey (1977 edition)
contains the technical details of the Jupiter images from the two probes,
if this helps any:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/app2.htm

[tedstryk]

Here is a view I have worked on from scanned data. It is a "look-back" image. Due to data rate limitations, Pioneer only transmitted every other line of this image. The original is extremely jagged because of that.