MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[nprev]

I actually see what looks like two specular reflections, Hannes. Might those be from high-altitude ice (H2O or CO2) crystal clouds?

[H. Griebel]

They are indeed specular reflections, not ice clouds. Very well spotted! The albedo is very high and the terrain very smooth in that area.

Cheers,
Hannes.

[H. Griebel]

Here is another another annotated composition I made. It shows the area around Huygens crater and Hellas. The horizon circle doesn't match because the spacecraft moved away from the planet as the pics were taken, and in late December when I made that composite I didn't know how to correct for map projection. I obviously also didn't know how to use the vmc2rgb with flat fielding. :-)

[H. Griebel]

This composition was also made in December, but already map projected. It shows the area around Newton crater, and shows the terminator. No flat fielding here either. Saturation and contrast were enhanced though and noise removed.

[H. Griebel]

This is the first half of the Tharsis composite I posted earlier. I made this composition after it was downloaded from Mars.
Added here for good measure, it also shows the terminator. Map projection is not 100% correct though.

[H. Griebel]

And finally a medium range composite, made from two images acquired a fortnight or so ago. It very nicely shows the heavily cratered southern hemisphere and Hellas.

[stevesliva]

They are indeed specular reflections, not ice clouds. Very well spotted! The albedo is very high and the terrain very smooth in that area.

Interesting. I'm totally going to tell my grandkids to look out for this when they orbit Mars.

[H. Griebel]

Here are two versions with suppressed brightness variations, also getting rid of the specular reflections. The CCD isn't really overexposed in those areas so some picture information can be recovered.

[H. Griebel]

Here is the cylindrical map projection so processed:

[ormstont]

Hi all!

First off thanks to Hannes for his work on the VMC images, it proves that they can be just as interesting for us working on the mission as for everyone else! We're hoping to post his work soon on the blog, as with any public submission.

I just wanted to get in touch to highlight the VMC observation which took place last Saturday (http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/972)..we think we've managed to observe the shadow of Phobos crossing the planet as it transits between the Sun and Mars. I've added a special post about this here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/973 and you can see the full resolution version of my little animation here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/gallery/6/...sit_Anim_TO.gif.

We're always impressed by the results from UMSF so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you make of these images, and of course seeing if we can confirm that what we see really is Phobos (I've checked and think the size, speed and direction seem right)! If I get some nice results I'll put together a special post highlighting everyone's work. As always, it's your discovery, the amateur community of VMC are our scientists so lets see what we can get!

[elakdawalla]

Neato, Thomas! Here's my version.

For the rest of you, I just exchanged emails with Thomas about the point of view of these images -- he told me "the light splat is Argyre Planitia and the chain of 4 craters coming away from it are (from left to right): Lohse, Helmholtz, Wirtz and (my personal favourite) Galle."

(Galle is, of course, the famous Smiley Face crater.)

[Deimos]

Amazingly, there was a contemporaneous uplooking photo from Argyre, taken with the amazing SNCam (umm, that would be "Starry Night" Camera), showing the Sun, Phobos, Earth, Moon and Venus in a cosmic right triangle. (SNCam has no difficulty seeing faint celestial objects in the daytime through the dust...)

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[elakdawalla]

Wow, that's a great camera, I wish we had more of those!

[Juramike]

MEX VMC thumbnails from Feb 11 onwards are now in color!
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/991

[ormstont]

Was wondering how long it would take someone to notice Yep...the VMC shots are now in full colourful glory! They've actually been colour for quite some time - we've been using ugordan's excellent vmc2rgb v2 tool - but originally the software we wrote didn't do any enhancement so the images were (as I'm sure you're all too familiar with!) very very low saturation and basically looked almost grayscale.

With the work done by our amateur community (and in a large part UMSF!) we've learnt some ways that the "inadequacies" of VMC can be overcome systematically. This started with ugordan's brilliant addition of flat fielding to vmc2rgb, which we didn't use straight away because I needed to track down the problem of the pixel shift which hit some images (now fixed!). I also wanted to find a way of putting the channel mixing techniques into our software...which I eventually managed to work out, along with a touch of saturation boosting and unsharp masking.

All in all I think the end result is pretty good, not quite as good as hand-processed images but good for an automated process! I'm going to write a proper post about it early next week, crediting of course all the work put in by you at UMSF, it's really in the spirit of what we're aiming for with VMC that the improvements come from our amateur community and improve the images for everyone! Thank you to everyone who's made this happen...and enjoy the new images!