MSL - Astronomical Observations, Phobos/Deimos, planetary/celestial observations and more Options

[fredk]

Another attempt at the Pleides/Hyades, this time using the four frames that show all of both, and performing rotations and slight rescalings to align the frames better:

(I prefer not to do any "linear filtering" since this way you can identify the stars by eye easily since their trails all have the same direction and length, and the result looks like an actual photograph.)

[Phil Stooke]

These are from the sol 979 Phobos images, start and end of the sequence. Each image is a composite of five frames.

Phil

[elakdawalla]

Drat those JPEG compression artifacts. We'll have to come back to these when they're in the PDS.

[neo56]

Last picture of the sun taken with MC100 at 18h29 local time:


I managed to do an animation of the sunset as seen by the MC100 but I had to blur several pictures to smooth green artifacts.

[vikingmars]

My visions of Sol 956 sunset images... Enjoy !

[neo56]

I was not satisfied by my animation of sunset pictured by MC100, mainly because I had to blur pictures a lot to remove the green artifacts resulting from debayering process.
This afternoon, I found a nice way to remove the green artifacts with Inpaint plug-in in G'MIC for GIMP.
Here is the animation I made after processing each MC100 pictures:

[Phil Stooke]

Phobos just after coming out of eclipse on sol 987. This is a composite of five images.

Phil

[Gerald]

Sol 987 MR Phobos images cleaned from hot pixels, as far as availbale so far:

First three images (Phobos in shadow) with 4-fold brightness relative to raw images.

[Gerald]

Three sol 987 images stacked, with Phobos in the shadow of Mars, rotated 90°:

[Gerald]

Using some of the Sol 987 Phobos images to qualitatively simulate stellar occultation data of the Sun by Mars, as seen from Phobos:
Phobos images merged into one image:

Phobos images devided by a fully illuminated and respectively registered Phobos image, to remove most surface properties of Phobos, and to reveal the relative intensity of the solar illumination:

Median-filtering (above some trigger brighteness of the reference image) on lines perpendicular to the apparent motion of Phobos, values visualized as constant grey-scale along these respective lines:

Rotation and some additional displacement trying to adjust for the apparent motion of the Sun, seen from MSL, to get data of the transparency of the Martian atmosphere (qualitative occultation data), for a subset of the images:

[Astro0]

Back to the Sol 956 sunset for a moment.

Something I've been working on for a bit of fun... a near real-time sunset sequence based on those images.

Enjoy the animation Youtube link.


NB: Sky and Sun are synthetic. Don't consider this accurate in any way.

[john_s]

Flawlessly done, and quite moving. Thank you!

John

[ngunn]

a near real-time sunset sequence

Wonderful!!! You have to be so vigilant here in order not to miss something like this.

[tanjent]

The combination of our familiar sun setting towards an alien horizon really makes this scene resonate.
Out of curiosity (small c), I searched for sunset scenes containing another semi-familiar element: clouds.
Found only some pre-dawn images from Pathfinder.
The page name refers to "sunset" but the only sunset picture seems to be cloudless.

http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/clouds_sunset.html

Is there a general tendency for cloud cover to dissipate during the Martian day?

[nprev]

Stirring, powerful; a fire for the imagination.