After finding the Apollo Picture Archive site at:

http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html

I decided to create some panoramas from them. This is the first one I did:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...nt%20Hadley.jpg

More to come ofcourse

Stunning!

I'll look forward to more of those. Good work.

I think a good project for NASA would be to get out all the Apollo from lunar approach, orbit, and the surface (and hopefully the Earth shots as well) negatives and produce ultra-high quality scans (on the quality level Michael light used, minus the retouching). Then put the archive on the internet. With full quality "raw" data to work with, many could produce stunning result like Light was when he got special access. I think the improved imagery (the overcopied 60s and early 70s low contrast versions don't cut it anymore) may spark more interest in returning. The site you got your imagery from which you made your excellent mosaic has good quality imagery but is woefully incomplete, except perhaps for Apollo 11 surface imagery .

Just a quickie before I go to bed:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...racy%20Rock.jpg

What do you guys think ? Should I remove those cross hairs from the images or not ? It's not very difficult to remove them with the clone brush, just a lot of work. For large panoramas it's probably several hours work, so I'm wondering if the better looks will outweigh the time I need to spend on it.

Remove them - and you're part of the Conspiracy

Doug

I have also dabbled a wee bit, but I have nowhere near the mad skills you all possess -
I like to take the pans and make them into QTVR; so that's my particular shtick, I guess.

Here is where I post my amateur efforts -

http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/FileSharing2.html

Right now there is only an Apollo 12 pan there, used to have some of the MER pans as well as QTVR, but took them down to save space a week before Apple upped everyone to 250 megs. I will load the others back up there soon.

You need QuickTime to view - sorry Linux users - - but I really like how zooming and panning gives a sense of "being there."

Enjoy?

A work in progress of a nice but hard to make panorama:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...Station_wip.jpg

I'll probably redo some control points - the auto pano tool did - by hand, have the panotools take care of the brightness and color differences and finally patch up some last alignment errors by hand in Photoshop. Looks like I have my work cut out for the weekend

I just got a copy of Light's "Full Moon" book, which is impressive but suffers a serious image quality flaw that I haven't seen mentioned. In the B/W images, but not the color images, the darkness of the shadow or sky areas "bleeds" into the nearby lighter areas. The moon's limb looks fuzzy even on the cover image.

This is a flaw that results from the spreading of light from the bright areas in the original negatives (i.e. the dark areas in the positive prints) when they are copied. I've seen this flaw in other versions of the Apollo images, dating back to the 1970s when I worked on some of these images as a summer student. The flaw can't be present in the original negatives themselves, and shows that either Light did not have access to the original negatives, but to poorly-made copies, or that the scanning process he used replicated the light-spreading flaw that had shown up in earlier analog copying of the original negatives.

So if NASA goes back and makes new digital "Masters", I hope they do so from the original negatives and not from copies that already have this flaw.

In his book Michael Light claims he scanned the master negatives. Just read the page called "A note on the photographs" in the back.

He didnt get to scan the masters - he got to scan the first-generation copies.

The masters are in frozen storage somewhere

Doug

Do you mean here?

Oh great. Now I have the Indy soundtrack buzzing in my head again...

I think scanning technology has hit the point where it would be worth getting them out of storage, making the best digital scans we possibly can, and then putting them back in storage. If we are never going to get them out, why are we preserving them? And this seems a worthwhile reason, as it would cut down on the need to get them out again .

Too long ago I toyed with Apollo panoramas. Today was so hot that I decided to spend the entire afternoon behind the PC with the air conditioner running. This is Shorty crater, the place where they discovered the orange soil during Apollo 17:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...0quarterres.jpg (570KB)
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...r%20halfres.jpg (2 MB)
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...ty%20Crater.jpg (26 MB)

(Note to moderator: Perhaps move this thread to " SMART-1 + Lunar Exploration" ?)

Great!!!!

Nice work! Keep 'em coming (hey you got airco -no excuse )



Regarding autopano...I'm spending some last time on the Rub Al Khali pan. I knew this was going to be a nasty one for autopano but I didn't think I'd be that awful... 9 out of 10 frames came out with zero control points -selecting the best points manually over the 96 frames is, well, rather tiring, but I'll get there, and by that time I never want to see a blueberry again.

Nico

The Moonpans website now has VR (Virtual Reality) QuickTime movies of their panoramas... By The Way each Apollo landing site panorama is available as a giant poster !
Check it out at:

http://moonpans.com/vr/

Philip

Apollo 15 Station 6:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...0quarterres.jpg (210 KB)
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...6%20halfres.jpg (690 KB)
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...Station%206.jpg (2.5 MB)

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/Apollo...Station%203.jpg (3.6 MB)

Marvellous pictures! When I see these pictures, the Moon hills are so smooth, rounded, with shapes nothing alike to dunes in the Earth, besides, there are many minicraters and I tought how luckly are the astronauts on the Moon surface without being hit by a meteorite.

Rodolfo

The black sky looks so strange after we've gotten used to Mars' sky, too.

Great!

Yes, some beautiful pans. I have to point out an error though. The Apollo 14 pan signed by Ed Mitchell points out features he calls "Doublet Crater". Actualy it's not, it's part of the ridge south of Cone Crater, with a crater called "Old Nameless" on its slope. Double was in the other direction and basically invisible in the down-sun highlight. Ed mis-remembered after all these years.

Phil

You know, Phil, it's funny that Ed Mitchell would misremember such a thing, when you and I remember that landing site so vividly. (Yes, I know Ed's getting up in years... but still.)

Even to this day, some 35 years and five months later, I still could walk up to a picture of the landing site and point out Triplet, Doublet, Weird, Outpost, Flank... and, of course, Cone and Old Nameless. Heck, I can even usually find the Cloverleaf and Star (which were Apollo 13 designations that got dropped during Apollo 14 planning), if the image includes enough of the surrounding terrain.

I don't know why that particular landing site was so memorable -- maybe because it was small enough for you to memorize all the fine detail (unlike some of the J-missions; I have to look at a map to tell you where Salyut and Earthlight were located at Hadley, for instance), but varied enough to provide some very memorable features.

One thing I never understood -- if sampling Cone was so important, why didn't they land in the valley between Cone and Triplet? They could have easily deployed the ALSEP to the north or south, in better and flatter terrain than up near Doublet, and would only have had to walk a half-mile to get to Cone and not the mile they ended up walking... oh, well, I guess it's a little late to be second-guessing such things.

-the other Doug