Deimos images, Viking and others Options

[elakdawalla]

Hi folks, as I've been working on this advent calendar thing I thought it'd be fun to dig into the Viking archive on Deimos and make my own color composite (since Viking is, as far as I know, the only mission that's gotten views on anything other than the Mars-facing hemisphere). The data is quite a bit more gnarly than I anticipated. Thanks to Peter Masek's VikingOrbiterView software though I have put together a montage of all the halfway decent Viking Orbiter images of Deimos, and I thought you guys would enjoy. Attached also is a color composite from a set taken at random (made by making an R-G-V combo, mixing a bit of the green into the V because the V is a little underexposed, and then converting to HSB and swapping in one of the much nicer clear images for the brightness channel). Anyone else want to have a go at making a pretty color combo? Anyone have any helpful comments on the color? The images in the montage are not processed at all except for removing salt-and-pepper noise and (in a few cases) doing some destriping to correct missing lines, so there'd be nothing wrong with grabbing individual images straight from the montage rather than hunting down original files. I've posted the montage in PNG format here.



The view in the attached color composite is primarily of the leading and southern hemispheres. Deimos has this weird squashed south pole -- I guess it's one big impact crater, but it's a crater with a diameter similar to that of Deimos itself.