[X] My Assistant

[Brian Burns]

Hello,

I'm a bit new here - I recently started on a project which I thought would be fun, to assemble movies of all the Voyager flybys. Of course, with 70k+ images, it would have to be automated as much as possible, and the results would be fairly crude. But there's enough information to make some rough black and white and color movies with one segment per target, and eventually combine them all into one movie.

The main task is getting the images properly centered, since the cameras don't point right at the target - there are still some jitters at the moment, so it needs some more stabilization. But in any case, here are some slightly bumpy rides along with Voyager - these are from versions 0.3-0.34 -

Ariel (Uranus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeGgH34v8R4

Uranus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLGadmvc40

Neptune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlU2_NOgoew

Assembling a color movie is a matter of combining the images that seem to go together (since it's not explicit in the data) - this is a first attempt at that. There are frames that lack certain channels, so colors are pretty off at points - later it could borrow a nearby image when a channel is missing.

Neptune, colorized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8O2BKqM0Qc

The goal is to generate the movies with as little manual annotation as possible - there are parts that need it though, like handling images with multiple targets, slowing down the movie at certain points, and turning off the centering at closest approach.

Anyway, just wanted to share what I've got so far - hopefully one day it will be able to make a nice, stable movie of all the flybys, with some appropriate music. Once the code is a little more stable I'll post the project on GitHub - it's written in Python with OpenCV, SciPy, and IMG2PNG.

-Brian

[Astroboy]

I love Voyager movies! People complain about the quality of Voyager images, but they really aren't that bad, especially when freshly processed, and I think they look even better animated. For me, the leftover fuzziness and other imperfections add to the warm, nostalgic charm, and what's almost as cool as a spacecraft carrying a record with Chuck Berry on it to the stars is a spacecraft using an old, 70s TV camera out at the orbit of Neptune. Besides, the Voyager images of the Jovian system, and especially Uranus and Neptune's, are still some of the best available.

If I could offer one suggestion, it would be to think about uploading movies using a single filter and exposure. Sometimes the alternating filter/exposure kind of movies give me eye strain. Really cool stuff you're doing!

I always thought it would be really cool if a crowdsourced project came about that divided all the Voyager images into their respective sequences, animated them in all color combinations available for each sequence while also animating single filter versions, and then made simulated movies out of the mosaics, showing the changing perspective of the target over the course of the mosaic's creation. Then all the movies could be arranged in chronological order and slapped on a Spacecraft Films-style DVD file. Each alternate color or single filter version could be accessed through alternate DVD angles - I've been able to do this myself.

I don't think the Voyager images are ever going to be obsolete. It's a great data set to play around with if you're just starting to get good, like me. Also, even when their scientific usefulness is dried up, they will always be of interest to people who want to see what a particular spacecraft saw at a particular time. That's the big reason I like Voyager movies. You get a unique view from a fantastic spacecraft during a great period in space exploration.

[Brian Burns]

Yeah, some of the mosaics I've seen on this site are really amazing. I still remember the slightly fuzzy images of Io, Europe, and Ganymede I got in the mid 80s - those old NASA 8x10's - and those knocked my socks off.

I initially wanted to make the movies with the RAW images because I like the imperfections also, but it turned out to be too difficult to detect the target across all the different image backgrounds, so I just switched to the calibrated images. It would be possible to write out the target x,y values from the CALIB images to a file but that was just adding more complexity - maybe later.

And I'd thought about limiting some movies to a single filter also, but I hadn't considered the exposure time - maybe you could adjust the brightness depending on that value also. Or try to align the brightnesses across all the different filters in some way.

But yeah, in looking at these Jupiter images, there are tons of 2x2 and 3x3 color mosaics that would be really beautiful - it would definitely need to be crowdsourced in order to incorporate those into a movie. They need to be manually aligned, except for places where there's enough detail for some image stitching algorithms to help. But with the right set up you could have some .csv files describing the alignments which could be hosted on a GitHub project, then people could work on different chunks. Might take a while, depending on how many people were interested. But it would make for really cool HD movies or DVD with the larger mosaics.

And I guess there would be areas of color missing from some of the frames, but you could incorporate prior images into a composite or mosaic also - maybe that would look alright in most cases. As it is now, the colorizing routines manage to group the ogb images together into the different segments of the mosaics, but they're all out of alignment, and of course not put into mosaics.

And it's a good idea to make all the color combos available - I've never tried a disc that had alternate angles. Do you mean you were able to make a DVD that did that?

Yes, the Voyagers were really amazing - and all the planning that went into targeting all these different objects and guiding the craft through the orbits correctly is pretty awesome. And yeah, I think the image quality is fantastic.