I just ordered myself a 40"x40" poster print of the full disc image. Couldn't resist. Using my upcoming birthday as an excuse.

Raw images are posted! http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/

Good! I need my Pluto fix!

Well, there is one other thing: a moldy cantaloupe!

Oh, I'd take orbiters over flybys any day. But I doubt they'll be a feasible option for KBOs for the forseeable future. Shotgun flybys is my pie-halfway-to-the-sky.

I'm thinking it's high time we start mass producing New Horizons clones and shotgunning them into the outer solar system.

Come now, Phil. I'm pretty sure everyone here can remember late June!

I was born the same year Voyager visited Neptune, so this is the first of this sort of brand-new-world flyby* in my lifetime. It's super exciting!

*Excluding comets and asteroids, but I've arbitrary limited the meaning of "world" to bodies that won't let you accidentally tumble off into space.

I took the liberty of combining Phil's map with Marc Buie's color map:

First, run-of-the-mill color blending mode:


Second, a more creative interpretation, using several layers and blending modes:


In both cases, I offset the Buie maps 80 pixels to the right to (attempt to) align the most prominent albedo features.

Naturally, take this all with a grain of salt, it's just Photoshop fudging.

Here's my take, pretty modest sharpening, enlargement, and stack:

Here's my version of today's image:



There's definitely a feature visible near Pluto's right limb, and Charon's got all sorts of stuff going on. Some of it may even be real!

Here's my take on the shots from yesterday:

Charon and Pluto are already known to be tidally locked to each other.

I recommend decreasing the brightness to about 85% before sharpening/deconvolving. It prevents the highlights from over saturating.

No pressure, it's just good to know it hasn't vanished, and that there are now backups.

Emily! I saw your presentation on the Voyager 35th video, can't wait to see the full set of images! After 6 years, this thread will finally have closure.

I mean no offense, in fact I greatly admire you and the rest of the MSSS team. You've (collectively and individually) accomplished some amazing things. I just have a rather negative gut reaction to lossy compression.

EDIT: Also, about the demosaicing: I'm quite certain you know what you're doing. I'm referring to the anomalous horizontal lines in the MARDI images, which I assume (perhaps mistakenly) have to do with the demosaicing, the quality of which I (again) assume is limited by the limited processing power/time of the rover. I also fully realize that more complex, non-linear interpolation algorithms aren't very conducive to scientific analysis. Perhaps my excessive assumptions are correlated with the fact that the MSSS team has cameras in space, while I have a desk cluttered with scavenged optics and a spectrograph made of LEGO bricks and a mutilated DVD-R.

I suppose that sort of makes sense. It makes the photographer in me cringe, and explains the sub-par demosaicing, but I understand the logic behind it. As someone who frequently deals with video encoding, I'm well aware of the relative compression efficiency of redundant data.

At least some of the images are compressed in-rover, but I suspect these glaring artifacts are the result of recompression for the web. Especially since the data is almost certainly transmitted as a grayscale image with an intact bayer pattern. It'd be rather silly to debayer it on Mars and triple the amount of data that needs sent.

That's the JPEG compression having an aneurysm.

@bdshort:
Take a look at Avisynth combined with the MVTools 2 plugin. With the right settings it gives results comparable to and sometimes better than After Effects.

Heck of a coincidence I was listening to this song when I first saw this thread.

Walfy, your first image is mismatched (possibly throwing off the ones that follow, as well). Here's a correction:


(click for full size and download)

Someone requested linearized images? Here you go, cross-eyed 3d to boot.


(Click to view larger and download full size on Picasa)

Sorry for the double post, but today was the big day!



Here's my niece showing off our film in the local Blockbuster store. Pretty exciting! It's in every Blockbuster location in the US (there are still 2,500 of them despite recent cutbacks), and is the first indie film that they have added to their selection in over a year!