.
I have to admit I'm a real sucker for those "first images of..." They're a great reminder of how far we've come.
Ted Stryck has a http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/index.html.
Don P. Mitchell has some http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm.
Cool Mariner 4/6/7 ( and more ) stuff:
http://members.tripod.com/petermasek/marinerall.html
Some additinal Mariner 6/7 material:
http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/index.html
The problem is having the original datasets for the Pioneers and Veneras.
Otherwise one can only work from published JPGs ou images scanned from paper...
.
Don Mitchell has gotten ahold of the original Venera surface transmissions, and is looking for the Venera 9/10 orbiter image data. His work is based on the original 9-bit imagery, which really helps the quality.
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_Catalog.htm
As for the Pioneers, the best thing would be to go back to the original transmissions from the photopolarimeter scans and reconvert them into images using modern software. However, they are 6-bit, so the quality will be limited. But I imagine modern processing could do much more to fix stepping errors and the effects of spacecraft motioin - it often took 40+ minutes to scan a full image of Jupiter and Saturn!
In the case of the Venera data, that is a Russian thing, so it is a little trickier. The raw tapes were public domain, but again, since foreign, wouldn't be covered by FOI. Pioneer is another story. I think the problem in that case lies that, if the original transmissions even survive, they may be in an archaic format on brittle old magnetic tapes that need special equiptment to be copied, if that is even possible. Also, for Mariner IV, much of the original digital data is missing.
I have not come across original Pioneer image data on the PDS. The NSSDC holds prints of all Pioneer images (made using the original processing of the data), as well as polarization data and copies of the images on microfiche. But I have no idea where the original transmissions are, if they are still around.
.
The digital data for the final versions of <most?> of the Mariner 4 mars images are available in many university engineering or aerospace department libraries. *** IN PAPER COPY! *** The Mariner Mars 1964 Project Report <in multiple volumes> contained a volume entitled something like "picture element matricies", which contained PRINTOUTS of the 200 lines and 200 samples of 6 bit data for each processed image.
I've wanted for years to scan and OCR the data and make digital versions of the images, but ..... time and effort .....
Note that the mariner 4 images were taken in alternating red and green filters, with every third image not recorded. So the pictures are: green, red, missing, red, green, missing, green, red, missing etc. The corner of one image of each red/green pair OVERLAPPED by about 100 pixels, so there is some color data from the Mariner 4 images.
All that was done for the final project report was not entirely accurate registration of the overlapping image segments and either differencing or ratioing of the images to separate color differences from brightness differences. Nothing was published in any form as a color picture from that data to my knowledge.
Mariner 6 and 7 returned two "primary" image datasets of Mars. Far Encounter and Near Encounter. Far encounter data was narrow angle only, near encounter was alternating wide and narrow angle images. The narrow angle camera was monochrome, with <I think> a yellow filter to "cut haze", while the wide angle camera had a 4 position filter wheel. I think red/green/blue/green.
The spacecraft had dual tape recorders, derived from the Mariner 4 hardware. Unfortunately, it did *NOT* have the capability to recorde the entire dataset in digital form.
All data was recorded on an *ANALOG* tape at full resolution, after being sharpened with a circuit that enhanced fine details. Near encounter analog data was recorded after being passed through an automatic gain control filter <which totally trashed absolute intensity values for the data>. Unfortunately, the taped data was degraded by significant in-flight buildup of tape oxide on the playback <record/playback?> heads, resulting in horizontal streaky noise and banding and occassional analog dropouts in the images.
Every seventh pixel was recorded on the DIGITAL tape recorder without automatic gain control, after having the two most significant bits chopped off, which badly "contoured" the digital data. To make matters worse, the middle 1/4 or 1/5 of each image's digital data was not recorded, spectrometer data being transmitted during that gap <and between the end and beginning of each scan line as well>. BUT..... every 4'th digital pixel in the center gap was trasmitted in real time!....
The efforts to reconstruct the images were described in the Mariner 69 special report issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, published in 1970 or early 71. They were largely successful, producing 2 versions. One was from the analog data, and was a "Maximum Discriminability" version of the data, best showing fine details. The other was radiometrically decalibrated using preflight and some inflight data on camera background and shading and spectral response, starting from the reconstructed final images. These show the real contrasts of the martian surface better, and the regional shading of the albedo markings.
The wide angle images were taken in overlapping swaths through alternating color filters, and some color information is clearly present in the images. The viewing geometry changed from frame to frame as the field of view was something like 15 degrees. I have never seen attempts to generate color images using the overlapping wide angle close encounter images.
Mariner 69 also returned a "secondary" image dataset... the every 7'th pixel data <missing that central stripe> was transmitted in real time. Most of the far encounter data includes at most slivers of the planet's limb, as the disk was within the central stripe, but Mariner 7 transmitted a unique set of WIDE ANGLE "Late Far Encounter" data with the filter wheel stepping. This data was not recorded for playback. There is a picture floating around made from this data of a half mars <cut off by that central stripe> of the Sinus Meridiani area, in color, with mabye twice or so the resolution of most any earthbased mars imagery from that period.
Mariner Mars 1971 was to be a two spacecraft mission. One spacecraft was to be placed in a high-inclination orbit optimized for mapping, the other in an orbit optimized for "variable features" and atmosphere studies, with viewing geometry repeating closely evey few orbits. Mariner 8 went in the drink due to launch failure, and the Mariner 9 mission was redisigned to do both tasks, with the emphasis on mapping.
The imaging system was an upgrade of the Mariner 69 system, but with a new, all digital, tape recorder, capable of storing some 33'ish 800x600 or so pixel images. As before, the narrow angle camera was monochrome, with I think a yellow "haze filter". The wide angle camera had a filter wheel with a quite nice set of (I think 8) filters: Violet/Blue/Green/Red, 3 orange polarizing filters, and maybe Clear.
When Mariner 9 got to Mars in Nov 71, the greatest global dust storm *EVER* observed on the planet, which had started in Aug or Sep 71 was still essentially obscuring the entire planet. The dust was starting to settle, but... the only things visible with any contrast were 4 dark spots (the tharsis volcanos, sticking out of the dust) and the small summer south polar cap.
Mariner started it's pre-programmed mapping sequences, but it was immediately obvious that they were 3/4 useless, and a couple of makeshift interim observation sequences were developed and put in operation. A better dust storm and south polar observation sequence followed about a month after arrival, and included test mapping pics to check on atmosphere clearing. Things progressively improved and mapping was started in <I think> early January 72.
*UNFORTUNATELY*.... by then, due to a hardware failure, the filter wheel on the wide angle camera had stuck on one of the orange polarizing filter positions. The data was acceptible for mapping purposes, but any further color imaging was lost. Some color images of dark albedo markings at high southern lattitudes were generated as well as color pictures of the south polar cap and surrounding hazy atmosphere and dimly visible surface, but that's all I've seen.
Mariner 9's camera had one severe design limitation that made quantitative decalibration of the images very difficult <The Mariner 69 cameras had the same problem>. Each vidicon image exposure was erased with repeat scans of an electron beam after electron beam readout from the camera, but the erasure was incomplete. Ghosts of previous images with some 5 to 10% of the brighness of the previous image, then fading slowly, persisted in subsequent images. In mapping strips of images, that wasn't terrible, but when the ghost images contained the bright limb of the planet, they were awful. The strength of each ghost depended on the pixel location, and the brightness of the previous image and the brightness of the current image. The resulting images were significantly degraded cosmetically and scientifically by the residual images.
Mariner Venus/Mercury 1973 (Mariner 10) solved the problem with perfect brute force engineering. Each of the twin cameras contained a ring of several small "wheat bulb" light bulbs! After each exposure was read out, the light bulbs INSIDE the camera were turned on, totally and uniformally saturating the vidicon surface with light. The cameras then erased the vidicon repeatedly, before taking a new exposure. Residual image was reduced to essentially undetectible levels.
The Viking Orbiters and Voyagers did the same thing. The "Light Flood" could be turned off when desired, as it left a background level of "glow" noise in the images, and when Voyagers, in particular, were doing long exposure low-light-level imaging, the light flood was "off".
The reason so much of Mariner 6/7 imagery was sent back in a lossy way or in analogue was the extremely limited storage capacity. Mariner 9's storage capacity wasn't too much better, but since it wasn't a flyby, it didn't need to take and store so many images in a hurry.
As for Pioneer, what I fear is that the data suffered the fate of the original surveyor data. The surveyor data was preserved in the form of photographic prints, not original transmissions - at the time, afterall, who stored images in an electronic format? I also wonder about the fate of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter Cloud Photopolarimeter dataset. It must be recorded somewhere. But how in the world to convert it into a useable format...
I had not realized the entire set of Mariner 4 matrices were available. That would be a neat project. But a boring one at first.
Somewhere in my box of space slides from the 1970s (produced by the UK Woodmansterne company) there's a colour far encounter image from Mariner 6 or 7. It shows, as I recall, half the planet and in about three-quarter phase. My dim memory also suggests that the image appeared in print, possibly in a National Geographic Magazine around 1970.
The colour was none to clever, and without doubt could be improved on these days!
I am so consistently dumbfounded at the amazing depth and breadth of information posted by users here I just don't know what to say. Well done gentlemen. I really hope consideration is given by the creator of these boards to long term preservation of the discussions here.
To chase down the history and existance of the Pioneer Jupiter and Saturn image data (and the lower resolution polarimetry images), basically somebody needs to systematically contact and query the original instrument team members *and* their grad students. Work on the polarimetry data continued longer <I think> than the images, through much of the 80's.
The Pioneer Venus data continued to be taken at times up maybe to the end of the mission, in the early 90's, and is much more likely to be intact <readibility of old tapes is a *real* problem>. Again, the science team members and their grad students are ones to contact.
Yup, that's the chappie!
And my memory is better than I thought - it's exactly as I dcescribed it!
Now, where *did* I put that dratted bus pass...
peter59,
thanks for providing the link to your wonderful site. What an amazing work you have done !
One annoying problem with the radiometrically corrected Mariner 69 images was a "cleanup" that was only partially done. The camera had electrical interference that made noticible periodic noise "herringbone", etc. patterns in the data. This was removed from the full resolution analog data by Fourier transformation of the data, isolation of the noise frequencies in 2-D frequency space, and transformation back into Cartesian image space.
This was ***NOT*** trivial in 1970. Unfortunately, the same noise pattern was present in the 1/7 and the 1/28 digital data streams, aliased by the 1/7 and 1/28 undersampling of the data. You can see it in the pictures posted above. Unfortunately, they did not remove the periodic noise from the digital data streams, and that was put back into the images when the digital data was merged with the analog data. The radiometrically restored images thus had the periodic noise from the 1/7 data in the outer parts of the image, and the different pattern of noise from the 1/28 data in the middle strip. *SIGH*.
Easy enough to fix now, just very "fiddly" work. I really do want to see what color information we can get out of the Mariner 6 and 7 pics. I've wanted that for 35 years.
.
GregM and 4'th Rock are certainly on the right track. Both results, even if "quick and dirty" look quite decent The registration on the mariner 69 stuff is better than I expected. The "less red" color of Sinus Meridiani is certainly real.
Note that the Mariner 69 pictures exist in multiple versions. And both mission slewed the scan-platforms back to partially overlap the earlier imagery at a different phase angle. Mariner 7 also photographed overlapping coverage with Mariner 6 for comparison purposes.
Residual image of the martian limb is visible in the Mariner 7 color version. Subtraction of an earlier limb image, or a shifted version of one image from itself should substantially reduce the @#$@# ghost of the limb.
The best possible Mariner 4 work will be when somebody can scan and OCR the paper copies of the 6 bit pixel data lists "picture element matrices" in that Mariner 4 project final report volume. One of the more sophisticated, modern pixel interpolation techniques <not just bilinear or cubic convolution> image resampling would also help suck the most possible from the 200 x 200 images. The ultimate restoration of the Mariner 4 data would require some form of interpolation of the "contour lines" formed by the 6-bit digitization to synthetize pseudo-8-bit data.
Nice work... keep at it!.
Speaking of historical images, this is some work I did with some more recent historical images. It shows Europa and the Jovian rings. It is a mosaic of framelets from Galileo's C10 orbit. Europa appears multiple times within the sequence, but I edited that out. This shot gives you an idea of some of the Cassini-like shots Galileo might have send back had it not been sent across the country twice in a semi truck.
http://img229.echo.cx/my.php?image=galeurrings5hx.jpg
It's show and tell time.. I guess. Here's another new version of some historic images...
This is extremely impressive, IMHO especially peter59's work with the Mariner 6 & 7 images.
I have also been processing some old images, mainly from the Voyagers:
http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/images/
I have more that I'll put online someday. I have also scanned all Pioneer 10 & 11 images I could find. Many of these I have not seen online. I will probably add these to my website one day but I would just love to have these in digital form instead of scanned. Modern computers and software can do miracles, what I've seen here is much better than NASA's processing a few decades (!) ago.
I also recently downloaded all of the Mariner 10 images and have been playing with them. BTW are the earlier Mariner (4, 6 and 7) imaging datasets not available online - only on CDs ?
.
I promised earlier that I would post something from Surveyor 7 - and now I have to as I see Ted is about to trump me! So here are two images from Surveyor 7:
s7a.jpg is a detail, half the original resolution of my full pan but very heavily jpegged to make it small enough to post.
s7b.jpg is the full pan, reduced enormously in size. The full pan is about 10,500 pixels wide.
These were made by scanning ten prints of mosaic sections, joining them and removing the frame to frame tonal variations and other defects. Incredibly, in some areas it was even possible to correct mosaicking errors in the originals.
I have also made true full-resolution pans of a small area by scanning individual frames and mosaicking by hand. I will post something from that another time.
Phil
If I remember correctly, Voyager 2 also got some backside shots of Saturn's rings. Nor must we forget that one remarkable close-in shot Pioneer 11 got which, by pure luck, simultaneously revealed the existence of the F Ring and confirmed the existence of a 10th moon of Saturn (since both Janus and what would later be named Epimetheus were only suspected, not confirmed, in the photos taken of Saturn when its rings were edge-on in 1966). As an added stroke of pure chance, Pioneer then flew within only a few thousand km of Epimetheus (I don't know precisely how close) -- close enough for its radiation detectors to clearly sense the wake that the moon was plowing in Saturn's radiation belts. As I recall, it was the timing of this event which enabled them later to determine that it was also Epimetheus, not Janus, that had turned up in the image.
Both moons' existence was confirmed just a few months later by ground-based photos during the planet's next period of edge-on ring views -- which finally cleared up the long-lasting annoying question of Saturn's possible 10th and 11th moons by revealing that Janus' orbit had been miscalculated by Dollfus in 1966 and that it was (to astronomers' amazement) co-orbital with Epimetheus. The same photos revealed another major surprise: Helene, the first Lagrange moon discovered in the Solar System.
As for Pioneer's still-unmatched overhead shots of Jupiter's polar regions: the Juno orbiter, if it's selected for New Frontiers, will include a camera for views of Jovian polar weather patterns -- although its PI tells me that it's as much for PR as for real science.
Phil, I am nowhere near trumping you. It will be a month before I have anything to show, and my project is much less ambitious - just to clean up a few frames. As for the Pioneer data, it should be added that the scans were only 6-bit.
Phil:
Very, very nice!
Now, the $64,000 question (probably easily answered with someone with an eye for sun angles and knowledge of the landing point): Which way are we pointing?
And are the rim mountains of Tycho (or any other large crater) visible, or what?
The detail looks west and north, and the full pan has north roughly at the center and south at each end. The whole area is 30 km north of the rim crest of Tycho, in rolling topography, so you never see too far. Prominent hills north of the spacecraft, seen in these views, extend along a ridge from about 5 km away to 20 km maximum at the north point on the horizon (just a little hilltop among lots of others). So all these hills are on the Tycho ejecta blanket and no discrete large crater rims are visible.
The full size datasets will eventually end up on the Photojournal (current plan). Until then and the publication of my book I will not be making them public. (Though Ted has some!)
Phil
Thanks, guys!
I am attaching a set of maps which portray the Surveyor 7 location all the way from regional scales to the immediate vicinity of the lander. They are considerably reduced in size and quality from the originals to make them postable. This "zooming in" method of portraying a site is what I am doing for every mission.to the Moon... and later Mars.
The Tycho rim is 30 km south of the lander, but the size of boulders on the southern horizon makes it very clear that the horizon in that direction is VERY close... only tens of meters away. There is no chance the rim crest of Tycho is visible. You can't rely on the older reports.
Incidentally, similar kinds of arguments show that the position usually mapped as the Luna 9 landing site can't be correct either. I move it at least 20 km NNE of its usual mapped site, on very strong evidence from the surface images themselves.
Phil
Very nice, Phil.
Chris
Fascinating!
[quote=Bjorn Jonsson,May 22 2005, 11:23 PM]
[quote=tedstryk,May 22 2005, 07:49 PM]Does anyone know a good program for manually entering numerical values from a paper copy to make an image file? I could do it in Photoshop, but it would take forever and a day.[/quote]
If you have these numbers in a simple text file I can easily convert the file to a PNG (and if this because of the Pioneer images mentioned earlier in the thread then this is something I myself am interested in).
.
I didn't do the geometric correction!
The original mosaics were assembled by hand and re-photographed. Two sets were made - at USGS and JPL. At USGS the mosaics were assembled on the insides of hemispherical bowls about 1 m diameter, one of which is still preserved in a display at Flagstaff (Surveyor 7, a sunset view that I have never seen published, with shadows falling across the 'playa' area north of the lander). At JPL they did the same, but separately and possibly (I'm not sure) on larger bowls. The USGS ones were photographed in small sections at high resolution. The JPL ones were photographed using an ingenious geometry that produced rectangular prints - ten of which can be fitted together to make a cylindrical 360 degree panorama. So the geometric correction was done that way, a true physical projection.
I recently scanned the pan sections and I am now painstakingly removing the hideous seams and tonal variations. The results look good for Surveyors 1 and 7 but a bit bland for Surveyors 3 and 5 - I have not done 6 yet, but it will be bland too.
Phil
A number of postings back, somebody was "dissing" the Pioneer Spin-Scan Multi-Polariimiter/Camera as a primitive camera. I'd like to come, a bit, to it's defense.
The camera was actually 3 instruments in one. It was a zodiacal light photometer/polarimiter. On it's way out to Jupiter and beyond, it repeatedly imaged the entire sky except near the sun in red and blue light with full polarization analysis abilities. The resolution was terrible, about 1 or 1 1/2 degrees, but they were mapping the skyglow of the solarsystem, not taking pictures. They proved that the backscattered glow from the zodiacal light disappeared as you went through the asteroid belt to undetectably low levels, and proved that the gegenshein <counterglow--a bright patch in the zodiacal light centered on zero degree phase angle> was a photometric effect, and not due to a dust-cloud orbiting the sun at say the earth's L2 point.
Processing the zodiacal photometry stuff involved mapping the pixels onto the celestial sphere, identifying detectible stars in each field of view, and subtracting the calculated starlight to get sky maps free from bright star contamination. The team doing this work never produces sky-map images from the data, and I've always wanted to see color/polarization maps of the sky from the Pioneers.
The cameras also took intermediate resolution spin-scan polarimetry maps of Jupiter and Saturn with the disks well resolved at a full range of phase angles, not available from earth. Again, the images were 2 color, with full polarization analysys. This provided large amounts of QUANTITATIVE information on light scattering by cloud particles in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, data that was not duplicated or improved on in any way by the Voyagers. This data was and continues to be of use in modeling the structure of the visible parts of these planet's atmospheres.
Finally, the best images from Pioneer 10 had resolution approaching Voyager's best. Pioneer took a picture with 60 km/pixel <if I recall> resolution at closest approach. It''s reproduced in the Journal of Geophysical Research's Pioneer 10 special issue. Radiation hits caused the gain of the camera <basically exposure> to shift a few times during the sequence, and the data has a strong periodic noise component possibly associated with radiation hitting the spinning spacecraft, but it couild and should have been restored and composited into a color image. Voyager's best resolutions on Jupiter were only some 15 to 20 km.
I don't know any links, the Pioneer team never did a very good job of publicising their pictures other than the 3 versions of the NASA SP Pioneer book. They never did any real post processing either, after making final versions of most of the pics. I always though there was a lot more they could have done, starting with putting the raw and final versions of the pics on digital tape at the NSSDC.
I always found most interesting that "boiling porridge" of features in the Pioneer 11 pics of Jupiter's polar regions, something we have never seen since nearly as well.
The Surveyor hemispherical panorama domes (there *must* be a proper name for the things!) were featured in, as I recall, a 1966 or 1967 issue of National Geographic - one of the 'How The US Will Conquer Our Nearest Neghbor' sort of articles which they did quite regularly.
I made a preliminary page containing several Pioneer 10 and 11 images scanned from Pioneer: First to Jupiter, Saturn and Beyond (NASA SP-446). Back at the time I acquired this book (years ago) I was surprised the images weren't worse, before I had only seen very crude reproductions of the images.
The page is at http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/pioneer/index.html . I will add more images later.
These images are interesting, the belt where the Great Red Spot (GRS) resides was bright at the time of the Pioneer flybys and the GRS's color was far more saturated than it has been ever since. This contrasts with Jupiter's appearance in Voyager, Galileo and Cassini images. Also the Pioneer 11 images of Jupiter's north polar region are still the best images available of the polar regions. It would be very interesting to reprocess the original data using modern computers and software.
A few more words about the Surveyor panoramas. The first step was to find prints of the original pans for scanning. I often work at LPI in Houston, so on one trip I looked through the Surveyor stuff. They have all or most of the original frames archived as photo negatives, box after box of them - 80,000 total. But indexing is complex and messy, and besides I didn't have time to work that way. But they had dozens of folders of prints. I searched every folder. A few were mis-labelled, which didn't help. (I added a correct annotation but they are still filed with the incorrect labelling).
Among thousands of prints of individual frames or small mosaics were lots of 'regional-scale' mosaics, but most were compiled only for indexing/coverage plotting purposes and are 'aesthetically challenged' beyond belief. Ray Batson said they were compiled as the pics were coming off the printers to check for gaps in coverage etc., and they could barely keep up.
The useful ones are called "improved mosaics", made for science rather than mission operations. The tonal variations were reduced by processing (in the dark room, mainly) to give better-looking results. The collection includes a lot of mosaic fragments (sectors) with different lighting, but most in local projections which would take a lot of work to fit together. I needed the rectangular versions made at JPL which fit together into cylindrical pans. At LPI I found enough sections to do Surveyor 1, Surveyor 3, and Surveyor 7. These were 8 by 10 inch prints, one print per section, but sharp, and scanned well to give fairly detailed images. Full pans are about 10000 to 15000 pixels wide, each made of ten of these sections. LPI didn't have these for Surveyors 5 and 6. JPL didn't seem to have retained them - maybe in their archives which are a bit tricky to use like this.
Later I went to LPL in Tucson. They had large format prints of Surveyor pans, including Surveyors 3 and 5 which I scanned. They have the best Surveyor 3 material, including excellent prints of the horizon. Finally I spent a week at Flagstaff. USGS in Flagstaff had Surveyor 6 and a set of prints of a Surveyor 7 pan - but not in cylindrical format - which is different from the one I have done, taken near sunset. I'll post some details later. So between these locations I found the full data set that I needed. There is a LOT more to be done with the Surveyors, if anyone feels like a challenge!
Phil
The Surveyor images were recorded on tape... ANALOG TAPE in some form as a modulated slow-scan video signal. Selected images were later converted to digital format from the source tapes for test purposes and for quantitative analysis of brightness, color and polarization. It must have been gruelingly slow at the time, and the scientific yield was pretty modest. I doubt the analog tapes exist any more but you never know.
Some decade ago, there was a effort underway to get funding to digitize the analog format Lunar Orbiter raw data tapes. As I recall there were one or two known surviving and workable or repairable drives that they said <whoever they were, I don't recall, but it was a team in the planetary sciences community> would read the tapes. I recall some information about the tapes being found in some JPL paint storage etc building, where they'd migrated to from higher quality storage. <I don't recall if this is true or not, now> The effort fell through. NASA wasn't interested. I have no idea if the tapes still survive.
Shouldnt someone like the Planetary Society or similar be looking into saving this stuff?
Perhaps there's scope for a society dedicated simply to the finding, saving, recovering, and storing of this sort of data - not just imagery but any other instrumentation as well? With 300 Gig HDD's being roughly £100 - storage is disgustingly cheap - and now would be the time to recover this stuff for future generations!
For any of this stuff to be lost for good would be a crime beyond description!
Doug
Ted said:
Actually, that project is still underway.
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...erDigitization/
Actually that is being done by scanning negatives, not working off the tapes. I suppose it's possible that a few surviving tape images are included, but certainly most of it is from negatives. It's hard to get back to that way of thinking now, but in the 60s, when computer image processing was in its infancy - batch jobs, not on your desktop - but photo technology was mature (orthophotos, stereo plotters and so on), very few people were really concerned about the electronic version of the data. The electronic version was just an awkward but necessary step along the route to getting the really useful products, the hard copies. And film was the archive medium.
It was the geometric instability of the hard copy, (changing size with changes in humidity, temperature etc) that made the annoying reseaux (patterns of dots and crosses) so common on the older photos. If you knew where the dots were supposed to be you could always rectify the image to take into account any physical distortion or scale change in the medium. Luckily they were dropped after - mmm - Voyager, I guess.
Phil
...And I ought to add something about Russian efforts to do this, too. I'll have to do more later. Suffice it to say they are doing the same - for instance scanning Zond negatives and trying to recover Lunokhod mag tapes. I am in touch with the team doing this. Very slow, no money, part volunteer labor, but eventually it will become a Russian equivalent to a PDS node. But don't hold your breath!
www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1196.pdf
describes some work on this.
Phil
Yeah, Voyager was the last to have the dots. Vidicon cameras and film cameras (such as Lunar Orbiter and Mars 5) were prone to distortion. The next spacecraft with a framing camera, Galileo, used a CCD, which had no need for them. (Gosh that's sad - the 80s were a sad decade for American planetary science)
In the Pionner images of Jupiters moons Ganymede looks like a asteriod with two big craters.
Great work! ^
If remember right, one of the Pionners was to take better resolution images of IO.
Somthing happened and they where not taken.
Does anyone know what happened?
The Pioneer Jupiter missions were done by direct command from earth, the only autonomous capability on the spacecraft was to do a turn by precessing the spin with attitude thrusters, a midcourse maneuver, and a turn back to earth pointing.
The high radiation environment close in to Jupiter caused a number of command errors, such as gain changes in the closest in images, etc. The Io image was mis-pointed and the target was missed. It would have been a fairly decent image, too, not that many kilometers/pixel, maybe 20 or so.
What a shock it would have been if those images made it back.
The art work back than depicted the moons as Cratered frozen rocks.
Another project I am working on is trying to work with the Venera pans. I am hoping to make a few images that have a more "normal" design than the original pans. Here is one I am working on.
The thing that always amazes me about the Venera landers is that apart from a portion of the descent high up in the atmosphere which was under a parachute, they aerobraked all the way to the surface. One figure I've seen said that one of them landed at 7-8 m/s (that's about 15 mph, or 27 kph). It just goes to show quite how thick the atmosphere is on Venus.
Chris
The estimable Don Davis has also rectified Venera data, and created a very nice airbrushed rendition of surface details here:
http://www.donaldedavis.com/2004%20new/VENRDRAW.jpg
Please take note of Don's Copyright statement on the Home Page of his site!
WOW!
That is amazing!
Interesting images ! Very nice!
But those hills... are there really hills in the original images? Perhaps just some rock layers on the horizon.
Without geometrically corrected images it's difficult to judge.
I tried everything in my power to correct the Venera images with no results...
I even projectes the images into the inside of a sphere in Celestia and used the mouse to look around. It corrected some distortions, but not all!
if the hills are real does this in any way help pin down the landing sites?
Paxdan - no, it does not help locate the landing sites. The scale difference between the area photographed in the pans and the best Magellan radar images is still too large by a very large margin.
Phil
.
I have finally finished the Surveyor 5 pan. Here it is:
Phil:
Is there anything *interesting* on the horizon of your excellent Surveyor 5 pan?
Bob Shaw
Unfortunately there is no feature on the horizon which can be unambiguously identified in orbital images. The site was never imaged at very high resolution... S5 landed a bit off target. But one distant ridge to the east appears to be a crater rim, and if it is correctly identified it may lead to the exact landing location. It's not clear in this reduced version of the mosaic but eventually the full pan will be released. I think I have a match to this crater and it puts S5 in a location on the south edge of its tracking ellipse. Ewan Whitaker also agrees with the location I am now suggesting.
Phil
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm
Check out Don Mitchell's Venera stuff. It is by far the best I have seen (although I have seen a bit more than is on this site). His work recreating the raw images from the original data is far better than other sources available. Plus, he has lots of neat info on the other Veneras.
Here is a perspective drawing I made in support of the rectified airbrush view referenced earlier. I also made vertical projections and side views including the spacecraft, all plotted by hand. I abandoned the scenery mapping work because the airbrush required constant tweaking while performing at it's fine detail limit. I will redo such work digitally one of these days.
Don
I have created a new Venera page.
http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/venerac.html
tedstryk Great work! Your web-page is in my bookmarks as one of my favs.
Also going back to the Pioneer images of the great red spot, they seem too orange compared to the voyager images.
How did Jupiter change so much from 1974 pioneer to 1979 Voyager?
But if you look at Jupiter from 1979 to 2000 very little has changed, at least to me
it has.
Jupiter is highly variable with time. The change in the GRS's color and contrast is real, it had a darker and more saturated color at the time of the Pioneer flybys than a few years later when the Voyagers flew by. Also the belt in which it sits was bright at the time of Pioneer flybys - it is possible that when this happens it becomes more difficult for the GRS to become 'contaminated' with material from surrounding areas.
Another Surveyor 5 scene. This goes out to the horizon north of the lander.
Thanks for the links!
It really did change! It looked more like Saturn's atmosphere.
The GRS as said looked stretched out.
.
The Soviets also made map-projected versions of the pans, but they appeared only in obscure publications. It's too bad they didn't get more widespread publicity, but maybe we will be able to create the definitive maps ourselves now. These venera images were, and still are, a remarkable achievement.
It is interesting to look ahead to what could be done in future. The Veneras dropped blindly onto an essentially unknown surface, but future probes could be targeted for specific geologic units. If we could get a simple probe with a bit of surface chemistry, descent imaging and a high resolution pan in areas of known geologic context we would get to know Venus a lot better. That sort of mission should be well within the Discovery budget as it's very short and landing is easy.
Phil
[quote=tedstryk,Jun 3 2005, 03:48 AM]
It is a shame that hasn't happened. By the way, there are some scans of some bad reproductions of those images you spoke of (V9/V10)
And here are my ink drawings of overhead views of the Venera sites, all hand plotted and drawn. These are scanned (although I still have the originals) from 'The New Solar System by Sky Publishing 1st ed. 1981. I largely used as reference a set of Russian prints given me by Hal Mazursky which revealed unusual details in the foregrounds, particularly the cracked 'broken pavement' rocks in Venera 10. The Venera 10 print appears here:
http://www.donaldedavis.com/BIGPUB/V10.jpg
Although later recent versions of the Venera images are clearly superior, I used the best material available for twenty years.
I have also made a set of similar drawings of the Viking sites, which appeared once in The Planetary Report. I will dig up my copies of the sample field maps with the various rock nicknames which Henry Moore gave me.
Don
Here is my last Surveyor 5 effort. The horizon south of the landing site.
Here is a first result of the Surveyor 7 work I am doing. It is a cleanup of a single S-7 frame. More to come, but this could take a while.
That's really nice, Ted. I found it on my full-size pan... it it SSE of the lander, looking back towards the rim of Tycho, but all we see is a rocky ridge one or two hundred meters away.
Will your images fit together to make a section of a pan?
Phil
Well, yes. Due to the Venera's being expected to only last a few minutes on the Venusian surface (all four that imaged the surface lived longer than the minimum requirement, sending back multiple scans), and due to the desire to scan both to the horizon and right in front of the lander, while at the same time being able to return the whole image without succombing to the heat first, they got the idea of scanning as they did in one image. To go from the surface to the ground in one scan all the way across would have either been too many pixels or too low resolution, depending on which trade-off was made. To project the surface as in a MER/Pathfinder/Viking/Surveyor pan, the forground bit of the spacecraft should appear as a straight line. Although it is actually round, the camera's scan follwed this shape as well. What would be interesting to do, and now that I look at 4th rock's projection it is very close to beiing this, is make a polar projection. This would leave the forground spacecraft round, but it would be a full circle, not egg shaped. This would be much easier with exact numbers to go by.
Mare sites varies in one important parameter. Age of the lavaflows. As seen from the lander's camera, the older the site the thicker the regolith, and the larger the smallest crater with blocky ejecta on it's rim.
Surveyor 1 site is youngest, with a shallow regolith about a meter deep. Surveyor 3 site is somewhat older. I don't recall the regolith depth estimate, but landing in a crater left the results not entirely relevant. Surveyor 5 and the Apollo 11 site is on old mare flows, with an estimated regolith thickness of 5 meters. Surveyor 6 site is oldest, estimated at 10 meters.
Surveyor 7 site is so young the regolith estimate was some centimeters. Since the spacecraft landed on an ejecta blanket that's rubble and "soil", it's not as obvious how young the site really is, but regolith forms on discrete geologic units, like lava flows and thick ejecta blankets.
Here'a a rather bizarre-looking image...
Hmmm, thinks... we are getting so much moon stuff in this thread, it should probably be restarted over in the moon area... maybe my next one will go there.
Phil
I just wanted to say that Ted and Phil's work is great. Until the MERs, and except for Apollo, panoramic landscape views of other worlds numbered only a handful, and it's great to add a few to the short supply. It can be possible to slice and carve and repaste some NEAR/Eros images to create a full, realistic-like panorama from that asteroid's surface, and Don Davis has produced a great image showing the foreground of such a view, sans horizon.
Phobos and Europa also have some high-resolution orbital views on hand that might be parlayed into some interesting representations of near-surface horizon-looking views.
I care not where the images are put, so long as put they are! The way that you guys (you know who you are) have rescued these amazing images from the depths of time is a joy to observe, and I wish you all much success in your future efforts!
Er, that's a hint!
Keep up the good work!
I have been working on projecting the V-9 pan. Here is my latest.
Re: distortion in panoramic images.
We see the world as if it were painted on a sphere whose center is in our eyes... like the astronomer's celestial sphere in concept. Flattening it out into a plane is like making a map projection of that spherical surface - we are mapping the inside of the sphere instead of the outside of the Earth, but the geometry is the same. So any cylindrical panorama can be plotted in the equivalent of a simple cylindrical (equirectangular) projection - which stretches the foreground sideways - or a Mercator projection - which keeps foreground objects in the correct shape by also stretching them vertically. That's what causes the difference between the pans in the last post. Neither is wrong.
Phil
Oh - and incidentally, we don't know what geologic unit we are viewing here, but this is what I would expect a tessera landscape to look like.
Phil
Great work everyone.
Has anyone tried to color this Black and White pic?
4th rock: Great result with the Venera image. It is amazing how confusing they are. I think the problem is that the scan followed (at a tilt to get both the foreground and horizon) the circular shape of the lander, and hence is from multiple perspectives, and hence is very hard to conform to what a human eye would see.
Venera 13 and 14 took color images. There was practically no signal in the blue channel as it's "gain" was not boosted independently of the green and red channels, and the sulfurous atmosphere is nearly opaque at blue wavelengths.
The surface is essentially gray in the resulting 2-color (green,red) images. This turnes out to be expected. Fine grained hematite, for example, red or purple-red on Earth, turns black at Eenus temperatures as the red/far-red reflectance band is "squeezed" into the near infrared. You can observe this on a rusty woodstove's galvanized chimeny. If the stove is roaring and the chimney is so hot it almost glows, the rust color on it turns black. When it cools off, it's red again.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I mean that it went through a complex set of reflections to get into the camera, and that may introduce some distortion if there was any parallax. There is a great description of the Venera cameras here:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Cameras.htm
Don Mitchell attempted a super-resolution view with V13/14 data, in hopes that variations caused by slight atmospheric distortions might create enough variation to make this effective. While it slightly improved the images (and this might be, like Viking and Pathfinder, simply due to slight changes in camera pointing more than true atmosphere effects), not much of an change was seen. The lack of "waviness" (like the effects we see here on earth on a hot day) indicate that the atmosphere isn't having too much of a distorting effect, unless it is extremely constant.
With the Cassini image release, I have been trying to wrap up some other projects I have been working on. This is a compendium of Voyager 2 enhancements I have been working on. All are super-res products with between 2 and 4 images stacked, except a few in the Miranda sequence that are single enhanced images. Also, the Europa image is from Galileo in the I33 orbit. The image was extremely distant, but taken with four filters. To combat the tiny image size, I created a tri-color image, and used it as an overlay for a super-res image created with all four frames. There was a problem with overlap in this "on chip" mosiac, so the those portions of the images were not used. Also, the left-hand limb in the Miranda picture is not a super-res product (only one image extended that far).
Ted
http://img297.imageshack.us/my.php?image=latestimagesstryk4xw.jpg
Tedstryk love your work.
That's a keeper!
Very nice images. The colors are very realistic!
Thanks. I left this image out, but I thought I would post it for the heck of it. It is a super-res view I made of Saturn and Titan from C22 orbit data from Galileo, taken as a calibration exercise. The data is really noisy, which, despite cleanup efforts, led to a bit of a lumpy appearance. The color was generated from red and infrared data, which is why it looks a bit odd. Titan was artificially brightened.
Nice surprise!
It looks almost the same as a Saturn image taken from Earth using a small 4 inch telescope and a webcam. :-)
Ted:
Very nice Voyager images!
I wonder whether any of the Mariner 6 and 7 far-encounter images can be similarly treated?
Bob Shaw
JPL made a global map mosaic of Mariner 6 and/or 7 images. The effort for computers at that time was too great for them to attempt any sort of "image quality weighted average" to blend the overlap between images together and make a seamless mosaic. It's been rarely, if ever, reproduced since about 1970.
Note that Rosetta will make a gravity assist flyby of Mars. They really should be able to get a spectacular Mars Rotation Movie on the approach and/or the flyaway.
There are two Web sites online that this group may find useful:
The 1968 NASA classic Exploring Space with a Camera:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/sp168.htm
And this site has loads of online NASA documents:
http://www.geocities.com/bobandrepont/unmannedpdf.htm
I am a major longtime "fan" of the early space probes, especially Surveyor and Pioneer.
Speaking of the latter, is there any kind of a history on the early Pioneer lunar probes, especially those ones launched in 1959 and 1960 that barely even made it off the ground? Images would also be great, thanks.
That book is one that I have a copy of and am quite fond of. As for the geocities site, great find too! It make sense of a NASA online archive (which all the lists are just links to - http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/ ) The NASA site is almost incomprehensible, so this really helps.
"Exploring Space with a Camera" by Edgar M Cortright was widely distributed and shows up used quite frequently.
A quick check on www.abebooks.com <advanced book exchange> shows 265 copies for sale, starting at $1.00 and going up to $200 for an edition signed by astronaut Charles Duke.
edstrick, the global mosaic of Mariner images of Mars that you mentioned was Mariner 9. Well, presumably... Mariners 6 and 7 imaged restricted areas, and of course mosaics were made... and they imaged the whole planet at a distance and mosaics of those images could have been made... but for Mariner 9 a big globe at JPL was covered with images to create a global mosaic - that's what i assume you were referring to. I have a JPL booklet describing it with lots of illustrations.
Phil
Bob, I have the same globe in my office! Yes, it's a nice one, and for others' benefit I should say it shows the Mariner 6 and 7 details including, as Bob mentioned, Nix Olympica as a giant crater - it certainly did look like that in Mariner 6 and 7 images. The rest of the surface is M6-7 and earth-based albedo patterns with fictitious craters scattered all over it.
The same company (I think) made a nice lunar globe with Luna 3 data for the far side, which we have in our Map Library at the U. of Western Ontario. If anybody is ever passing this way (London, Ontario) drop in and see the Map Library, one of the best in Canada. It has a pretty much complete set of USGS lunar and planetary maps and some earlier items, good for browsing if you are not familiar with these products.
Phil
While trawling the National geographic CD-ROMs for the images from the US DODGE satellite I came across some interesting colour and b&w Surveyor 1 images - including the infamous spheres used for panoramas.
While trawling the National geographic CD-ROMs for the images from the US DODGE satellite I came across some interesting colour and b&w Surveyor 1 images - including the infamous spheres used for panoramas.
WOW!
Has anyone ever reprocessed those pictures from surveyor?
The Mariner 9 globe was in the lobby of the US Gelogical Survey's Flagstaff Field Center the two summers (78 and 79) that I interned there as a grad student. It had some handling damage <a few torn or scraped photos>. I think I've heard it's been "conserved" and is somewhere it deserves to be in good condition.
The Mariner 69 map was a digital mosaic in simple cylindrical or Mercator projection that they made from approach full disk images and left a lot to be desired, but was a good try.
The #8 Surveyor 1 image in the batch just posted is an example of the image product that was digitally reprocessed at the time. The horizon and rubbly-crater image (#6) shows some of the ghosting and smear in the analog electronics, including the analog film recording data on Earth. There is a version of that in some later Surveyor publication showing that image and a digitally reprocessed version that was much crisper and not smeared/ghosted as a comparision.
For reprocessing *REALLY* historic images, check the following web site at the Library of Congress. (Then go to the home page of the exhibition for the regular tour)
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html
The important looking dude in the blue robes is the Emir of Bukhara in central asia. He probably could have taught bin Ladin and Zarquari a thing or two about beheading, but probably didn't need to do it much....
"The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world--the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population. "
Using an automated camera shooting 3 frames on one glass plate negative in rapid succession through R,G,B filters, he took extensive true color photography of Tsarist Russia before World War 1. He couldn't *PRINT* them, but he could project them in color through a projection system equivalent to 3-tube projection TVs. He emigrated after the revolution and was allowed to take most of his collection with him. His sons donated the lot to the Library of Congress.
I bow to more informed authority ..... (Mostly, I was being snotty.... Either way, one oriental potentate you didn't want to cross without one western potentate's army to back you up!)
Of course, the trouble in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that the local central Asian potentates were being backed up by TWO Western armies -- British and Russian -- engaged in a furious competition to control the region, each of which was quite happy to actively assist the locals in their snake-pit executions of the other side's operatives and citizens. (This is the famous "Great Game" that Kipling wrote so much about.)
By the way, Prokhudin-Gorskii also took a beautifully clear color photo of Tolstoy sitting in a lawn chair.
Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned By Tsar Nicholas II (ISBN:0385279272) Allshouse, Robert H. (editor)
(marvelous book) has that picture in it. One bookseller listing it on www.abebooks.com describes it:
Book Description: New York: Dial Press, 1980. Hardcover. Near Fine. 32 cm. To view these color images of an era we are accustomed to seeing in sepia tones is an experience of cultural shock-a trip in a visual time machine to a vanished and exotic \vorld that looks as though it had been captured by the photographer only yesterday." Prokudin-Gorskii, a chemist as well as a photographer, developed one of the earliest processes for taking color pictures and was the editor for many years of a St. Petersburg journal, The Amateur Photographer. During the six years he executed the Tsar's commission, he traveled vast distances in a special railway car outfitted with a darkroom-to the Urals, the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Siberia, Finland, and as far east as Turkestan. Eminent in his own country, he became one of the countless emigres to flee Russia in 1918, disappearing into relative obscurity first in Norway and later in England and France. Like Imperial society, he too was a victim of the upheaval of the Revolution. Prokudin-Gorskii managed to bring out of Russia his collection of nearly 2000 glass-plate negatives. This book, produced with the cooperation of the Library of Congress, contains 120 of his finest color photographs-including the only extant photo in color of Leo Tolstoy. Another 120 have been reproduced in sepia from black-and-white prints. 216 pages. Bookseller Inventory #007863
In my library (on the infinite "to read" list) is "The Great Game" on the struggle for central asia. Also on that damn list is "Dust of Empire" on modern central asia.
There's a big only partially true myth about the pre Mariner 9 view of Mars being "flat and dull". Mariner 4 indeed only got clear images of cratered terrain. Younger terrains were imaged at high sun angle and were not interpretable.
But Mariner 6 & 7, though the media coverage focussed on the moonlike cratered landscape, found enigmatic complex topography in the south polar region and saw the edges of the swirl pattern in the polar layered deposits. They saw "featureless terrain" that was clearly much younger in Hellas (dust haze may have actually hidden the smooth basin bottom), and Mariner 6 found chaotic terrain with spectacular but poorly imaged <high sun angle and noise> collapse features in the east end of what we later found was Valles Marineris and the chaos regions to the east. These features were known, understood as "special" and "interesting", but you just couldn't do much with the 1969 data. It did take the essentially global mapping done by Mariner 9 to show the whole planet's topographic variety for the first time.
Mariner 9 Must have knocked the scientists socks off when they realised was not a crater marked planet.
Was anyone around when the first images of the canyons systems and volcano's where imaged? What was JPL reaction?
I also noticed that the volcano's where misinterpreted as craters?!
That was kind of a gradual process. When Mariner 9 arrived, Mars had utterly shrouded itself in a very rare global dust storm as opaque as Venus' clouds, and so it only revealed its surface features in a gradual, suspenseful strip tease over several weeks. I didn't keep up well with the precise sequence of revelations -- I had just entered college, and had only daily newspaper articles to track the developments -- but the very first thing to be revealed was the fact that what they had assumed from the 1969 Mariners' distant and fuzzy global photos to be a huge "Nix Olympica" impact crater was really a huge caldera at the top of an even more gigantic shield volcano towering into the planet's upper atmosphere, and that it had three companions. (The equally startling unveiling of the Valles Marineris, and of Mars' valley runoff networks, came a few weeks later, since they were at lower altitude. In fact, the very first interesting photo from Mariner 9 -- taken when they realized that they would have to wait a while to see the planet itself -- was the first closeup view of Phobos.)
I'll have to reread the 1973 book "Mars and the Mind of Man", which may perhaps contain some historical information on the precise day-by-day sequence of discoveries.
When Mariner 9 got into orbit (after about 3 days of approach imaging sequences), it started it's preplanned variable features, atmosphere studies and mapping sequences. As they were already starting to suspect, some stuff was visible through the haze from higher altutude, though mostly as albedo features. Valles Marineris was bright with more column-mass of haze, etc. But it was obvious that the mapping sequences (which started in the south polar region and were going to move northward as lighting angles shifted) were nearly useless.
The quickly worked up first one, then an improved version of a monitoring sequence which did more atmospheric studies and only a few test mapping images, then progressively transferred to sequences more like the original plans as the dust finally slowly cleared.
There's a lot that could be done with the early dust-storm images, including some red/blue <i think> color shots and day to day variability in surface features and haze/cloud structures, but the data is intrinsically difficult to work with.
Mariner 9's camera had *BAD* residual image problems, producing ghost images of previous shutterings. The strength of the residual image depended on original brightness, current brightness, X,Y coordinate of the pixel, color filter used, etc... and there could be multiple residual images, slowly fading with subsequent shots.
The problem was the camera erased previous images with an electron beam, but the erasure wasn't complete. Mariner 10 solved the problem. They turned on a ring of miniature lightbulbs inside the camera after each exposure was read out, thus totally saturating the vidicon with a totally overexposed "bright field", then erased the hell out of that. So there was still a residual image.. but it was THE SAME every time. Viking and Voyager used the same technique.
Oh.. When absolutely no significant news was coming out from the mission after a month or 2 in orbit, I wrote JPL's press office for info, and got a packet with the transcript of a press briefing about a month after orbit insertion. I've still got that, one thing that should be scanned into a PDF one of these millenia.
For some of the online documents about the very things being discussed regarding Mariner 9, go here and scroll down to the Mariner dcoument section:
http://www.geocities.com/bobandrepont/unmannedpdf.htm
They were just recently posted. There are also some very interesting documents on Luna 9 and 13, with their surface images, plus great, great stuff on Surveyor!
Mariner 9 is probably the first deep space probe mission I remember. I recall the TV news image of a blank disk Mars on the screen at JPL. I recall even better the Pioneer 10 mission to Jupiter, with its very interesting and controversial plaque attached to its side.
Something we may not see the likes of again: During the Pioneer 11 flyby of Saturn in 1979 and the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune ten years later, PBS had all-day-and-all-night-long live coverage of those events. Especially appreciated in those days before Webcasts, NASA TV, and even cable in the case of Pioneer 11.
I recall my frustration with that mission that the probe could not take clear images of the Saturnian moons, but otherwise it was thrilling to have that You are there feel.
Any chance anyone has tapes of those broadcasts?
Here's a .PDF of a July 1965 paper by Clyde Tombaugh which is quite fascinating:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19650023657_1965023657.pdf
It's remarkable how far we've come (he argues for no aqueous alteration of rocks, no surface basalt - and asteroidal impact craters as the cause of 'oases' (in both senses of the Lowell tradition, ie circular features on maps and as abodes of life!)).
I have off-the-air audiotaped news coverage of Mariner 69, Mariner 9 and 10, Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyagers at Jupiter, not Saturn. I also have audiotapes of the actual JPL press briefings during the Pioneer 11 Saturn encounter, dubbed from JPL PIO supplied copies which were then sent back.
All I need is *** TIME *** and working space to get this stuff transferred to CD, but I currently have neither, living in cramped quarters and taking care of elderly family much of the time I'm not at work.
Before we sneer too much at Tombaugh. it should be remembered that that paper is one of the very few before the Mariner 4 photos which predicted copious impact craters on Mars. (As one scientists has said, it is "shocking that so many people were shocked" by that discovery.)
Bruce:
I wouldn't dream of mocking Clyde Tombaugh! His paper was interesting, but more as snapshot of the time than anything - he was actually quite radical, espousing large-scale surface altitude variations when it wasn't at all popular (remember statements like 'The Mountains of Mitchell are the only hills on Mars'?).
One other surprisingly public place Martian impact craters were predicted was in George Pal's 'Conquest of Space', where they're clearly seen in one of Chesley Bonestell's backdrops as the return-to-orbit vehicle ascends. Funny that Hollywood got it right, for once!
Bob Shaw
I have been continuing my work improving Voyager Ariel coverage. Here is a sequence of the approach images, super-resolution when possible and enlarged and enhanced when only a single image (or single decent image) was available. It extends coverage of Kachina Chasma, a large canyon on the moon. I started with the last approach navigation image before the first multispectral coverage began. I continued through the last far encounter sequence, and then added one post-encounter crescent image at the end.
http://www.imageshack.us
I also am working on the near encounter imagery. I am trying to make a super-res image from the near-encounter multispectral set, but due to distortion and spacecraft motion, I have not been successful so far. I have also worked with the highest resolution sequence, taken from 130,000 km at 2.4 km/pixel. The images below are at 1.4 km/pixel. The image on the left is taken from two close frames, showing the limb. All in all, the imagery created with two or three frames didn't gain much, but it did sharpen up limb pictures again. The best result was at the "heart" of the mosaic, where all four frames meet, which is shown to the right in the image below. It shows a very small portion of the moon, but is far sharper than the coverage we have of anywhere else on Ariel.
http://www.imageshack.us
Somebody commented in one of the threads that the ALSEPs detected a largish meteoroid impact on the farside of the Moon - does anybody know if a candidate crater was ever discovered in the Clementine data? I imagine that especially in IR it would have been quite bright, but obviously not all that large compared to all the other footprints in that particular sandpit!
I don't recall anyone attempting to match Clementine images with Apollo reports of an impact, but it would be a very hard thing to do. The location would not be well constrained (I am guessing to within say 5 degrees, 150 km), and the impact would have been small by any standard other than being the largest they detected. I would guess no hope at all of finding it.
Phil
Ted, very nice stuff on Ariel. I have done some of that too.
Did you notice... the highest resolution sequence shows some territory beyond the terminator illuminated by uranus-shine? There is at least one previously unreported crater in that area, and possibly a continuation of a major tectonic lineament. I had this in a LPSC poster/abstract a few years ago, but you could probably do more than I did with it.
After I found that I searched the entire uranus dataset for more examples, but no luck. The other moons were either too distant, so the planetshine was weaker, or in the case of Miranda, had poor viewing geometry.
The new Enceladus images include saturnshine coverage too, some of which is in brand new territory west of Voyager coverage.
Phil
I missed that...I will have to go back and look. The canyon definitely does extend farther. It can be seen in all the images in my sequence except the first three and the fifth (the reason the fourth shows it but not the fifth is that the fourth is super-res and the fifth is a single frame) which are too distant and the crescent view.
I found it interesting it the highres bit that many of the troughs seem to actually be rows of inteconnected pits, something not visible in the regular images.
Edit: Here is what I could pull from these. You can see the canyon extension and a crater and several ray systems. It might be interesting to merge this with low resolution images of the area. I will try to make a more even mosaic, but it will take time.
http://www.imageshack.us
http://www.imageshack.us
This is the cleanest mosaic I can make. I may try to clean it up for a better looking version, but this version is more accurate, as I will have to subjectively judge what is noise.
http://www.imageshack.us
Here is the cleaned version of the image. This is exciting for me. I have long wondered what the northern hemispheres of the Uranian satellites look like. This is the view of one, hidden in old data.
http://www.imageshack.us
Is that Ariel?
Very nice!
This was my version:
Excellent image. You are right - the second terminator is farther up the image than I first thought. I have been searching images of Triton and the Uranian moons. I have found some planet-shine in distant Triton crescent images, but they are too distant to be useful. Umbriel shows a hint, but nothing worthwhile. I am trying Miranda, without success so far. I think this Ariel set may be unique.
-
Mariner Mars 1969 Final Project Report
Volume 3: Scientific Investigations
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710027927_1971027927.pdf
"I had not realized the entire set of Mariner 4 matrices were available. "
They're in a volume of the JPL-TR-32-.... series Mariner Mars 1965 Final Project Report <or whatever> volumes. I don't have it, but engineering libraries may. UT Austin's copy was missing by the late 70's.
Boring job?.. That's what OCR is for. Once you have a clean text of 200 lines by 200 samples, it's relatively simple to turn it back into an image. If I had the text, I could do it with software I have at work with a batch command file.
I have cleaned up some Oberon imagery...man that is a horrible data set!
http://img341.imageshack.us/my.php?image=oberonset9ku.jpg
http://img302.imageshack.us/my.php?image=oberonsuprescolors1nq.jpg
Ted, regarding your very nice Miranda image... I hate to say this, I really do, but there's a problem. The planet is off the image to the top, over zero longitude. So planetshine can't possibly reach the area at the bottom where you show it most clearly. That must be some kind of artifact. Sorry about that.
Phil
Actually, it turns out to be neither planetshine nor an artifact. Turns out there was a layer out of alignment in the original stack! It was used at such a low percentage and I skipped my usual step of converting to 16 bits for processing, and so it barely showed through - back to the drawing board!
oops
I have been playing with Voyager's Enceladus images, since they are the only ones that show the north pole. This is a work in progress. Color is only done for the Voyager 1 image and the closest Voyager 2 image. The first image is from Voyager 1, the rest are from Voyager 2.
http://img70.imageshack.us/my.php?image=enccombo10qz.jpg
I have made a color version of the second closest image, and placed it on the left here, with the closest image on the right. Although the resolution isn't quite as good, I think it shows a much prettier view of Enceladus, as well as a good view of North Polar terrain. You may notice that it looks smoother, due to the fact that these images actually fit together well, allowing a pretty good super-resolution effect - in fact, despite being much more distant, there aren't many features I can't see in this mosaic that are resolved in the closer one). Also, except for one clear image, no image in the highest resolution mosaic covered the whole disk....thus the color was done with a mixmatch of filters. The second closest image is a nice, OGV color image (one of my little projects with Voyager is to produce, when possible, OGV, OGB, or OGUV color (in order of preference, but I have to take what is available). The images match Cassini images much better when orange is used instead of green for the red channel.
http://img251.imageshack.us/my.php?image=encv28pn.jpg
I have come across a source for Pioneer 11 digital data for Io! (I don't actually have it yet, but it is in the pipeland as I understand). More to come in the coming weeks....
Looking forward to it!!!
Update. The Pioneer 11 Io raw image has been shipped to me and is en route. Might arrive today! (I am now headed to campus to check mail )
AH!... I found it.
CD with images I made years ago of Surveyor 3 color images.
I scanned RGB images out of NASA and JPL publications and composited them.
These versions are copyright 1997, by Edwin L. Strickland III
Of greatest interest are the only 2 images of a Solar eclipse from the moon.... what we call a Lunar eclipse.
NASA press-released only one, the worst of the two, and processed it badly.
Somebody... Phil?.. needs to to this from original negatives, not out of government publication halftones.
Hey, ed - lovely colour pan on the other thread! I have seen the Surveyor negatives at LPI in Houston... it would be a real hassle to find the negs you needed, though, the stuff is not very well organized. I was looking at prints, and found several mis-labelled folders. And the negative indexing is not going to be easy to use. But nobody uses it these days so there is no incentive to fix the problem.
On a related reprocessing note, I just received a review copy of Charles Byrne's "Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon". Byrne reprocessed scanned cpies of Lunar Orbiter images to remove the striping ( a parallel effort using better source material in in progress at USGS in Flagstaff). This book has hundreds of cleaned-up images, very nice, plus a CD with the whole set including frames not in the book. There are some problems with organization and indexing, but on the whole it's very good.
Charles Byrne worked at Bellcomm (the blurb writer for the back cover spells it Bellcore!), and when I met him in Houston he told me he kept the minutes for the Apollo Site Selection Board... which I had just been reading in LPI.
Phil
Edstrick - Excellent images - those are the best of a lot of those images I have seen.
Phil - Why does this lunar atlas just cover the near side - is a sequel in the works?
Ted, there were two major reference atlases from the Orbiter data in the 60s, the Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas, and the Atlas and Gazetteer of the Near Side of the Moon. This one is a sort of hybrid. It includes images from the first one, with names on a second version of the images, but only covers the near side. I don't know if a second volume is planned for the far side, but I doubt it. Most LO4 images were near side, with a much smaller number for the far side, so I would have expected the far side to be just added to this one. Maybe I'm wrong.
One flaw with the book (I'm composing my review a bit prematurely here...) is poor indexing. It's tricky to find the image you want. A set of coverage/index maps would have been useful.
Phil
The Byrne book contains image numbers. The 'Guide to Lunar Orbiter Photographs' from the same period as the others is an excellent way to find useful images.
As for the LPI site, this book is closely related to that. I think Byrne used the LPI online images or their original scanned versions as his raw materials. His book is like the LPI site on paper, in a sense, except it isn't searchable so readily and - on paper - it only has a subset of the images. The CD-ROM bound in it has them all.
Note that this is not the same as the work being done at USGS to digitize and clean up the Orbiter images. That is being done at much higher resolution.
Stryk, Strick, Stooke - I think we need some new names around here!
Phil
<nods at Phil and grins at Ted>
Ever see the books by Paul Lowman, "Space Panorama" and "Lunar Panorama"?
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=lowman&y=0&tn=panorama&x=0
ABEbooks.com lists 12 copies total of the two... That's pretty good..some as cheap as 35$ .. I'd been looking for them for 30+ years when I finally found copies via the Advanced Book Exchange.
They have the highest quality reproductions of images from Earth orbiting and lunar missions that I'd seen at the time, far better than the milky-gray government printing office books.
Lowman's still around, one of the world's great experts in aerial and space photogeology.
Edstrick is right, Lowman's book 'Lunar Panorama' is excellent. The reproductions were superb. Lowman is plugging away at things like lunar observatories these days. They are probably looking more likely today than they have for a long time, as part of the scientific rationale for a return to the Moon.
Phil
I have been working on the Venera images a bit more. Some of these are on my blog, but this is my latest project. Thre are some problems. The left hand pan has really bad color data (and I mean by Venera standards, where even good is pretty bad). Also, some areas are covered by a color mast because no color data was available.
I have also worked on my Miranda images. To the right is the super-res Miranda global color image, which I have influenced a bit with OGV data from farther out. On the left is a colorized global wide angle view during the near encounter. I think setting the images up like this puts things in perspective.
http://img368.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mirandacombogvuvogv2gz.jpg
Amazing stuff - I am just floored by your images, especially the Venera one. That pano really makes it seem you are standing right there on the surface of Venus; nice overview. I've got to keep reminding myself that the conditions there are so totally inhospitable, and those rocks are rocks on Venus. Wow.
Airbag
Thanks. I have worked a bit more on Miranda. I have tried to assemble the global mosaic avoiding reprojection when ever possible. This is what I have so far, but there are still some serious problems.
http://img122.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mirandagc0zl.jpg
I also did this one, of the one sliver that really seems to be improved by super-res processing (because it is covered by three sharp images).
Here you are!
http://img103.imageshack.us/my.php?image=hireslocation1qj.jpg
My big problem with reprojection on a world like Miranda is that you end up with artificially smooth limbs unless you have a terrain model good enough to reproject on to. And that still quite difficult to do convincingly.
Here's a wee treat from 1968. We have just been enjoying Spirit's hilltop panorama, and this is another view of some nice hilly scenery.
I love that image! By the way, I mentioned a while back that I might be getting some new Soviet Zond and Luna imagery. My reference librarians tell me that they are close to finding what I was looking for. My fingers are crossed (I now have two reference librarians (not just the part time assistants that are usually fine for finding things) working on the issue).
Thanks, Ted and Doug.
I think one message from Apollo and this image is that, with people in the loop, you can land pretty much anywhere. A lot of the site selection work for Apollo was based on finding the smoothest, safest places to land. But the pilots (I should really say the Commanders) could find reasonable places to touch down almost anywhere. I expect the next crews to land will have more hover time and better visibility, and will be able to go to places that were ruled out for Apollo.
This mosaic shows what is possible if anybody wants to dig into the rather nasty Surveyor archives at LPI or elsewhere.
Phil
Phil:
Well did!
Bob Shaw
Mercy Buckets, Bob.
The playa feature is just off my mosaic to the right. In fact you can clearly see how the ground slopes down towards it. But as far as I can tell, the flat, cracked, playa floor was not visible from Surveyor 7. It must have been just slightly below the level of a nearer ridge, which formed the southern rim of the playa depression.
Phil
Bob Shaw: "I just bought 'Lunar Panorama' and it has some excellent Lunar Orbiter images of Tycho in it...
Aren't Lowman's books great!..... Best versions of some of the 1960's space imagery ever published... and *INTELLIGENT* captions.
Since people liked the Surveyor 7 pic, here's another. This is a raw scan, I haven't cleaned it up. But the last image was very well known, and this one I can almost guarantee nobody has ever seen before. Tantalizing, eh?
This view looks at the same area as the last one, north of Surveyor 7 where a range of hills forms the horizon. But the light is lunar evening instead of lunar morning in the other one. A deep shadow falls into the Playa area.
Here are the scans I promised, taken from Paul D Lowman, Jr's 1969 book Lunar Panorama (pictures 11, 12, 13, 14 and 17). The originals are all B&W, and I've added in coloured numbers to the annotated images just where the original annotations were printed so that you can find the things. All these (except 12) are at 25% of max resolution, so if anyone wants bigger and better then e-mail me and you can have the 100% 300dpi scans. There are also a number of images of individual surface rocks, too, but I've not scanned them as yet.
There are some interesting Surveyor 3 and 5 images in the book too, which I'll scan in a few days.
Bob Shaw
shaw_bob@hotmail.com
I've got a question.
What program can be used to process those RAW pictures from Viking, Voyager, etc. at best?
I know that there is a program, called ISIS, but I'm running windows xp and that program is for Linux only.
I have finally gotten around to playing with Surveyor stuff. Here is a small Surveyor 7 mosaic. Phil, I am more impressed with your work than ever - this is one hard data set to use!
I have also been working on the part of the Luna-9 pan that was originally released by the British after being intercepted by Jodrell Bank's radio antenae. This view is produced using data from three scans at varying illuminations. It has also been somewhat corrected for the fact that Luna 9 did not land on flat ground. While this image is produced from views taken under very low solar illumination and is of relatively poor quality, it is the first scene from another world seen by the people of earth, save a few Soviet scientists who had the whole pan and were preparing it for release. The original Jodrell Bank release was essentially in Phil-O-Vision, due to an error in their understanding of how the imaging system worked. It made the moon look like the craggyl place of 1950's science fiction.
Just want to break in to say great work everyone! This is becoming one of my favorite threads.... but then again I can be a nostalgic person...
I have used Apollo color and a bit more processing on the Luna 9 scene. While it isn't even up to Surveyor quality, this scene is important to me, as I said, because for most of the world, it was the first extra-terrestrial panorama seen by humankind, thanks to Jodrell bank.
.
The latest Cassini images of Dione over Saturn remind me of an old Voyager view I am still tinkering with. Here is the best I can do so far. The problem is that available color is O B V UV. I have used OV with a synthetic green from O and V blended with 25% from the B image. Otherwise Saturn looks red due to color shifting. It is also enlarged via super-resolution processing using all four images (which are, unfortunately, underexposed)
Very good!
The data looks new ;-)
This took a lot of work for small returns, but I was curious what could be pulled from this data. These are images of the Uranian moons from the receding Voyager 2. The Miranda image is made from a single, nearly-blank frame, and the rest are from color filtered data (as close to OGV as possible given the horrible quality of the orange data). At any rate, these are the only views of these worlds from this perspective. They are in this order:
Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberion. There are some strange paterns on Titania's limb - particularly the big flat area. It was apparent in all the decent frames used to compose the image.
Back to Apollo... here's a polar projection of one of the Apollo 17 panoramas at Shorty crater, site of the unexpected discovery of orange solil. The pan itself was assembled first, then its ends matched, which was complicated because the astronaut moved a few steps as it was taken, so the foregrounds did not match very well. There is some serious distortion in that overlap area, but it's reduced in severity in the polar view because the foreground is so compressed.
My Apollo pans are for mapping purposes, so I edit areas of moving astronauts, shadows etc. to maximize surface visibility. This leaves oddly truncated people, equipment and shadows. But it helps my mapping work!
Phil
Phil:
Interesting perspective - any thoughts on the fuzziness as you leave the central area of the image?
Bob Shaw
Great work. I am currently experiencing what are speaking of with pans with moving centers. I have, for the past few months, been trying to assemble a pan (much longer than the one usually released) from Sojourner images. It has proved tricky.
Bob - the fuzziness is caused by me using a reduced size pan to make the polar projection. I had to make it on a different computer than I usually use and its RAM was too limited to work at high res. Then the geometry of reprojection stretches it out around the centre and makes it fuzzy, while compressing the centre and leaving it sharp.
Or you could get your eyes checked!
Phil
Here is my "Dunes Beyond the Rock Garden" pan. It is still a work in progress.
http://img439.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sojournerpan1xw.gif
Here are two more Sojourner pans. Here is one among the rocks soon after Yogi.
http://img442.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pan25me.jpg
And here is one of the Rock Garden itself.
Here is my preliminary version of a color Beyond the Rock Garden pan, using Sojourner color and gapfill based on Sojourner color.
http://img460.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sojournerpancol19lw.jpg
Very nice, Ted. It's good to see new landscapes in old data like this.
Phil
i love the shadow of sojourner in the bottom right corner
Here is a polar version of this pan.
http://img418.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sojournerpancol1pol7rw.jpg
Nooooo - that's a Phil-O-Sphere - Phil-O-Vision is vertical stretching
Doug
Doug... was your comment following on from something I missed or are you just babbling?
Phil
It's odd to see just how small Sojourner was compared to the MERs, and seeing how it wasn't able to move very far I recall now why no one paid much attention to this earlier mission.. Regardless, I salute your work. It will be interesting to compare this earliest data with later pictures.
I have finished a super-resolution view of the twin peaks from Patfinder. Most of the images are from the "super-pan," while the peaks themselves are taken from large stacks of subframes taken of them specifically for super-resolution processing.
http://img330.imageshack.us/my.php?image=colorpeaksg8wg.jpg
Here is a closeup of the peaks themselves. Since there is better quality data for this part of the image, I was able to pull more out.
http://img52.imageshack.us/my.php?image=colorpeaksc13sg.jpg
Ted - I mentioned this in another thread but it has probably got lost...
I'm assuming you're using this Pathfinder data set..
http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/DIS/html_ds.pl?ds=MPFL-M-IMP-2-EDR-V1.0
Do you know of anyone/anyway that one can beg/steal/borrow/hold things to randsom for the Pathfinder equiv of RAD's ?
Doug
The mosaic data set is Nasa funded researchers only - perhaps they're in there?
Doug
If you look here..
http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Admin/resources/ms_mpf.html
Here is Rimshot crater. It seems to have a lot of blocky material in it.
Here is an improved version of the Rimshot image.
Also, here is a view of Southeast knob.
I am moving tmy umbriel image posting to this thread from the Pluto one. Look there for earlier images from Ted Stryk and myself.
Here are two versions of the Umbriel mosaic of the entire southern hemisphere. Quality is reduced a bit. I think this is the first time the entire image set has been used his way.
Phil
cylindrical map:
Here is a merger of color and the best I could do with the closest images.
http://img307.imageshack.us/my.php?image=umbrielsupresgoodbestcolor4rz.jpg
Here is a slightly improved version.
Another polar pan...
Apollo 17, end EVA 1, at the Surface Electrical Properties site east of the LM.
Phil
Great image!
Here's another goodie from my files. My first love has always been irregularly shaped worlds... I mean, my first among spacy things (sorry, dear!). This is Deimos in transit over Mars, from Viking. Not sure if this one has ever been published anywhere. It's from Orbiter 1, orbit 564.
Phil
I have seen that image before, but I think it was on your website! Do you know if the original is actually overexposed to the point of washing out? If not, it would be interesting to play with the grayscale.
Ted, it's so long since I did that, that I can't recall if Mars is saturated in the images (I think it's more than one image in that sequence). Probably not, I'd say, but Deimos is so dark that I just overbrightened it. I was really only interested in Deimos. But I bet you could get something better out of it.
Phil
Here it is again : I published it inside "L'Astronomie Magazine" a few years ago. Deļmos was flying above Cassini Regio.
Enjoy as desktop wallpaper to download !
Thanks Ted !
Ans as a tribute to PHIL STOOKE's great work on irregular bodies and for his nice discovery of the location of Viking Lander 2 on Mars, let's dedicate to him this Phobos image.
It was flying above Ascraeus Mons enshrouded by morning clouds (also as desktop wallpaper for you to download).
Enjoy !
Here is the raw black-and-white version of Phobos passing over that volcano from APOD:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031129.html
Phobos Over Mars
Credit: Viking Project, JPL NASA
Explanation: Hurtling through space a mere 3,000 miles above the Martian surface, the diminutive moon Phobos (below and left of center) was imaged against the backdrop of a large shield volcano by the Viking 2 Orbiter in 1977. This dramatic picture looks down from the Orbiter's viewpoint about 8,000 miles above the volcano, Ascraeus Mons. Phobos itself is 5,000 miles below the Orbiter. North is toward the top with the Sun illuminating the scene from the South (black dots are reference marks). For scale, Ascraeus Mons is about 200 miles across at its base while asteroid sized Phobos is about 15 miles in diameter. In this spectacular moon-planet image, volcanic calderas (craters) are visible at the summit of Ascraeus Mons -- while impact craters on the sunlit side of Phobos' surface can also be seen!
For you to appreciate the picture processing, here is the REAL original pic taken by VO2.
Enjoy (if I may say...)
It's part of a set of several images : this is why in my processings you see more on the left hand side of the picture.
I posted some views of Proteus I have been working on in the Neptune thread. Here are some improved versions. To the left is an image based on the only multispectral series Voyager 2 obtained. To the right is the 1.3 km/pixel image (resampled to 2.6 km/pixel to compensate for the underexposer. While there is some data loss with regards to the outline, it definitely makes a better looking picture this way. Color is based on the first view.
Ted, is there any chance that the Voyager 2 images of Neptune's moon Nereid could be enhanced in any way to brijng out more details?
http://www.kilim.net.tr/astro/nereid.html
Here is a paper on the moon that may be of interest:
http://arxiv.org/html/astro-ph/0005050
Here is a Web site with imagined details of many small moons:
http://jestraddons.250free.com/moons/moons.html
Those Moons-over-Mars images are terrific.
wonderful job
Nico
I worked with the best Nereid set again. Sadly, the resolution, from 4.7 million km, is terrible - 43 km/ pixel, which I was able to improve a bit with super-resolution imaging. The next best set is in the 60s (in term of km/pixel). One interesting thing is that Nereid is relatively round. People often call it irregular because of this image, the image from the highest resolution set that is the longest exposure, not realizing it is smeared (this is an enlarged view - it is the view used to produce the "Views of the Solar System image).
Properly processed from the set, this is the image. Based on the fact that they are common between images, I can say that it does faintly show a hint of albedo features, but little else. The phase is somewhat less than quarter.
Here is a cosmetically improved version of Proteus. I cut the resolution to 2.6 km/pixel. Although in terms of basic shape a little is lost, it helps to make the disk as a whole appear sharp. I did a lot of work to remove noise.
This was my attempt at Larissa. This was done in IMDISP, if anyone remembers that, back in the early 1990s. I just found it on an old backup disk. It's a merge of the two best images. I never tried anything with Nereid.
Phil
... and ditto for Proteus, highest resolution image. It's fuzzier than Ted's as I was trying to reduce the noise, probably too much.
Phil
If a newbie can switch topics to a REALLY old but historic data set:
The Ranger moon images.
Some of the published images not only show moon craters with registration
marks, but on the edge of the image a clock and an image counter. But the
usual Ranger impact movies ("WheeeeeeooooooooooooCRUNCH!") don't show any spinning-hands clock on the side.
I imagine that clock was actually on the ground-based imaging device, but I
don't know. Did Ranger really have a clock dial on board?
I also imagine any signal data (digital or analog) is long long gone, so
any reprocessing has to be done with the book-published photos. Only a few
sample images seem to be available on the web--though I suppose I could rip
apart the animations!
John D.
No - I think every R8 and R9 image is here. R7 should follow. LPI in Houston is currently doing an amazing job of putting things on the web.
Phil
The clock and the numbers were on the ground equipment, NOT the spacecraft. There was no point in putting them on the craft itself -- and I can also assure you that they weren't on the live photos when they came in from Ranger 9 (which I saw).
Thanks. I thought so.
Out of curiosity, where are Ranger 8 & 9 photos?
The samples I saw were at the NSSDC site. Not sure where everthing else is.
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