[X] My Assistant

[Bob Shaw]

Have any of the serious experts on this board ever sorted out any 1960s images? I'm thinking of the Surveyor panoramas (in the 60s they did it with photos pasted onto the inside of half-spheres!) and the way that the exposure dropped off toward one corner, making a horrible patchwork effect. Or them lines and spots on the Lunar Orbiter images...

Most of the NASA mission data should be available as digital source material, and thus could be manipulated, though I suspect that getting anything 'real' from Soviet missions would be a bit of a chase!

Any thoughts?

[Phil Stooke]

I will post some Surveyor stuff when I have time. There are two low resolution pans of mine on LPOD - Lunar Picture of the Day (www.lpod.org):

Surveyor 1: http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2004-07-09.htm

Surveyor 3: http://www.lpod.org/archive/2004/04/LPOD-2004-04-20.htm

and here I attach a greatly reduced version of the Surveyor 5 pan I'm working on now:



Surveyor 7 - I'll prepare something soon. It is a nice pan! But I wouldn't call it "the most fascinating and beautiful lunar vista ever captured by cameras" - not after Apollos 15 and 17.

Surveyor 3 looks very bland. The mission had serious camera problems caused by dust thrown up by the small 'vernier' landing thrusters. Individual frames were not just subject to shading variations but also to dust contamination on one side. The camera pointing mechanism was partly clogged with dust, so only 90 percent of a full pan was possible, and many frames were taken with high sun or looking down-sun so lighting was bad. It was a nightmare, taking three months of near full time work (good job I have tenure!), but it does show the trenches - this was the first robotic arm ever operated on another world - and at full res it does show a lot of detail of rocks on the horizon etc., lost in the reduced LPOD view.