[X] My Assistant

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Besides the camera on the Venera-9 lander, there were also two cameras in the orbiter. Violet and ultraviolet linear cameras that scanned the planet as the orbit swept the probe by. Not many have seen these images, made 18 months before the Pioneer Venus orbiter. (Indeed, many Pioneer Venus publications claim it to be the first artificial satellite of Venus!).

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Here is a raw image, scanned on Dec 11, 1975 from 12:26 to 13:03 Moscow Time.

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From the times of the scan, and the parameters of the elliptical orbit of the probe, we can correct the view to create something closer to perspective (actually a spherical x orthogonal view). In addition, I did some deconvolution and contrast expansion. Actually looks like Venus now!

[edstrick]

Attached are 3 images for an amusing demonstration of my bandpass filtering method applied to slightly different data.

I work for what used to be a small company that built and sold industrial CT scanners -- Scientific Measurement Systems, of Austin Texas (now defunct). What used to be their "scanning services" division is now Pratt & Whitney Austin, where we do CT scan inspection of (mostly) jet engine turbine blades, plus other exotic and oddball items, including rocket engine parts (shuttle included) and other stuff.

I do image processing and analysis with a company home-brew image processing system that can handle 3-dimensional image "cubes" of up to a thousand or more images in 32-bit real-number-format, with total file sizes limited to 2 gigabytes by the Sun sparkstation file system file size limits. It gives me enormous power in some areas, but I'm often crippled by a total lack of commands in the software to do what sould be simple tasks, but which were never written and never needed for the industrial imaging uses.

Anyway, here's a quick demo on a familiar object:

Apple_r1 and _r2 are digital radiograms of an apple (a trace over-ripe, with a bruise or two). R1 is the raw data, directly comparable to a conventional x-ray. R2 is a bandpass filtered version of R1. Besides nearly invisible (in R1) fibrous internal structure, you can see a bruise shadowed on the right side of the apple and shallow bruises "on the limb" along the edges. Apple_1 is a CT (computed tomography) slice approximately through the "equator' showing some of the radial structure, the skin and the bruises.

Attached thumbnail(s)