Santa Maria! Options

[walfy]

Really nice work, Walfy... soooo tempting to just reach into the screen and scrape your fingers over that rough rock, isn't it?

Coming from you, that is a special compliment! At night I think touching those rocks would give you frostbite in seconds! With the sun on them, perhaps more tolerable.

I have to admit that I Photoshopped it a little by first forcing some detail out of the shadows, which gives more depth to that mini-chasm. That brightens everything up, which I've found makes it better for viewing with the glasses on since the glasses darken everything a little. Then I apply a little sharpening. This is done to each image separately, before bringing the two together.

[Astro0]

Sol 2552..Making tracks

[walfy]

From recent batch of images, a Santa Maria rock with protuberances (or whatever the proper geological term is) that render nicely in 3D. A martian Porcupine Rock of sorts!

[Stu]

The rock's impressive, definitely (and excellent work on the anaglyph! ) but my eye's drawn to the beautifully subtle patterns on the dust at its base... they're really lovely, I think...

[walfy]

...but my eye's drawn to the beautifully subtle patterns on the dust at its base... they're really lovely, I think...

I noticed that too. Lots of beauty along with all the science on Mars.

[jvandriel]

Here is the last Panoramic view of Santa Maria.
Taken on Sol 2543,2545 and 2547 with the L2 Pancam.

Jan van Driel

[Stu]

Great work, absolutely stunning view, thanks for that

[Stu]

Colourised view of Walfy's previously posted scene...

[walfy]

Colourised view of Walfy's previously posted scene...

Very nice!

(My apologies, admins, if this is off topic). By the way, there's a Firefox add-on called Download Helper that I just discovered (http://www.downloadhelper.net/), which lets me download all the mars images listed on any of the directory pages at exploratorium.edu, automatically. Much better than my manual method of yore. Then I can quickly view the images as thumbnails using Adobe Bridge (or any other similar app, such as LightRoom or Aperture). Perhaps many of you already know about it, but thought I'd mention it now. You can even set a file-size limit if you don't want to see countless photos of the sun as taken from Mars! But those are always mind blowing nevertheless.

An advantage of viewing the thumbnails lined up in Bridge is that I can get a mini 3D preview of the images by telling Bridge to sort them by file-name, which arranges each Left and Right image side by side if you set it right. This works if you "sort" the images "by filename," as each day's batch of images are in numerical order and each L and R image are usually in sequence, hence ending up right next to each other. the Left one shot first, the Right shot just afterwards.

I prefer to view them in 3D by the "looking through" method: my left eye falling on Left image, right eye on Right image. I find this much less headache inducing then cross-eyed method. If you prefer cross-eyed viewing, then you have to sort the images by descending order.

It might be worthwhile to get one of those old-time 3D stereoscopes that allowed you to view two large side-by-side aerial images on a page, but instead rig it onto a computer screen, set the thumbnails to a larger size to fit perfectly under each lens, and view these beautiful Mars images in large-size 3D without the red/cyan glasses. Using stereoscopes would render a much sharper and brighter 3D experience probably. I'll try to find these glasses online, report later if everything works.

If I only had their equipment now:


Wanted: centuries-old device for viewing images beamed from distant planetary robotic explorer.

[jamescanvin]

You're aware of MMB, right?

It won't do the side by side images your talking about but it is worth it for the downloading and sorting into folders (by sol) alone.

[walfy]

I wasn't aware of that! Looking forward to checking it out. Thank you. A bit of newbie here

[jvandriel]

Here is the panoramic L2 view of Santa Maria
taken on Sol 2539 and Sol 2540.

Jan van Driel

[jvandriel]

and the colorized version because it is the
last view of Santa Maria.

Jan van Driel

[elakdawalla]

You're aware of MMB, right?

Also, there's a forum topic for MMB that may be of use to you. Mike isn't doing tech support/bug fixes for MMB anymore, but it works fine without that -- I rely on it every day. One thing that Mike has started doing recently is Tweeting whenever he does a metadata update, so now I look for his Tweets to remind me when to run my own MMB update.

[jamescanvin]

It's taken a while for me to get around to this - the second colour Santa Maria panorama.



James