QUOTE (Decepticon @ Sep 23 2005, 10:05 PM)
tedstryk I was wondering if you have ever edited the image so it would look as if I was standing on Venus?
I once saw a image like it in astronomy magazine but it was small.
The net sum image data taken by a Venera camera would be properly compiled into a cup shape that shows you the horizon on the ends, and does *not* show you the horizon in the middle, but instead shows you the extreme foreground in the middle. Don Davis's sketch shows that cup shape in a grid across the middle of this image:
http://www.donaldedavis.com/2004%20new/VENERGRD.jpgIf the probes all landed straight up, it would be possible to neatly project their images into that cup shape, but if you try, you get results that are a bit off due to the tilt of the landers. I have played with these images to get acceptible looking cups, which I have stored on another computer than the one I'm using now. I frankly find them frustrating because the "best part", the middle horizon, is absent.
Venera 13 and 14 had two cameras facing opposite directions, and Ted's work shows the bits of horizon that are almost-contiguously captured by the side portions of the images.
There's really no better you can do with the raw data.
My attempt to use Venera images to give you the feeling of standing on Venus, I linked to here:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...topic=909&st=75As I said there, three of these images are 100% Venera brightness data, but I cloned and rearranged portions of the images so that any patch in my image is actual image data from that lander, true to the Y dimension, but slid around in the X to create a rectangular panorama with no gaps and pretty true to real Venus "stuff". The coloring is mainly fictional. The upper right image shows half of the Venera 10 "cup", which gives you an idea of what the whole set of 6 cups (1 each from Venera 9 and 10, 2 from Venera 13 and 14) would look like.
An all-real, non-fragmented panorama of Venus showing more than a bit of the horizon is simply impossible with Venera data. ESA hasn't said much about a Venus lander, so we'll probably see a first real panorama of Venus when the New Frontiers mission to Venus gets picked, which will either be fourth or fifth in that sequence of five (counting New Horizons as #1). That might happen around 2018-2025. A Discovery-class selection could perform that investigation (and others of great interest) but will likely not happen, IMO.