What an incredible shame...but also a call to arms for all you imagesmiths out there. I wonder if NASA would react favorably to an organized amateur (and, boy do I use that term loosely here) effort to digitally preserve images from the first Golden Age of UMSF?

I made this map for another purpose, but just in case it might be useful for anybody else - outreach or education, whatever - I'll post it here. The background is the old US Air Force (ACIC) Lunar Earthside Mosaic (LEM), a classic of lunar cartography in its own right. This time next year we should have two new sites to plot on it - both very near the south pole (LCROSS and Chandrayaan's MIP - Moon Impact Probe). I have not shown everything - could have added a few Lunas, the Apollo LMs and SIVBs, two failed Surveyors... but I chose what I deemed the most significant. A bigger version with everything is in the works.

Phil

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Here's a blast from the past. The horizon portion of the "Picture of the Century" (never call an image that until the last month of the century!), the mountains north of Copernicus viewed by Lunar Orbiter 2. Nasty processing artifacts are not my fault this time.

Phil

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I should have added hat these mountains are the Carpathians (Montes Carpatus). On Earth the Carpathians cross Romania, so the Romanian team in the Google Lunar X Prize is planning to land on the mare plains just to the north of them, able to look back at the other side of these mountains.

Phil

I think I have removed a few of the worst artifacts from that image (the horizontal banding), but it isn't really all that much better:

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Here is a compilation of relatively recent lunar images (the last decade or so) from spacecraft heading to other places. I only included global views, and I excluded views with orientations similar to that seen from earth (with the exception of the Cassini view because I had already processed it). I also left out some extremely distant images. Due to the lack of Rosetta raw data, Rosetta images are not included (I see absolutely no point in wasting my time trying to reprocess processed images when the raw stuff will be available sooner or later, rendering my effort moot).

The images are as follows: First Column: Top: Nozomi, 1998. Middle: Nozomi, 1998. Bottom: Messenger, 2005. Second Column: Cassini, 1999. Middle: NEAR, 1998. Bottom: Hayabusa, 2004. Third column: Top: Deep Impact, 2005. Middle and Bottom: Stardust, 2001.

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T you Rock!

Thats a keeper.

Yes, a great job, Ted. I don't think I've seen all of them before. Now I have to go back and check.

Phil

The NEAR image is the one from the famous Earth-Moon mosaic. I just stacked images until I could pull out some lunar detail.

Beautiful images, Ted. I'm struck by how unfamiliar - and downright alien - our Moon can look when viewed from a different perspective than the one we see every day.

For me, this disconnect or disorientation comes from seeing the Moon as an entire disk. It almost looks like a different place, especially in the far side shots where few or none of the familiar craters and maria are visible. From an up-close perspective like Apollo had from orbit, I'm mentally willing to accept that the craters and mountains I see are indeed our Moon. But from farther away, where it's obviously a "world," I get a sense that I'm looking at something else other than good ol' Luna. The far side somehow doesn't look as "beautiful" as the near side.

Maybe my 51+ years of looking at it, most of those years as an amateur astronomer, have helped me feel like I know the near side almost like the back of my hand. I imagine most of you are like me, that whenever we see a photo of the Moon on TV or in a movie, can tell immediately when the image is reversed, or that they substitute one of the Apollo full-disk shots that shows too far around the eastern limb.

If I were to wish one perspective change that we have for the Moon, it's that Mare Orientale would be facing more toward Earth! Wouldn't that be a glorious sight to behold every month?!

The lack of maria gives it an utterly different appearance. I agree that it seems unfamiliar. Also, as a consequence of the basins not being as fully flooded, it looks more rugged.

Here is another rarely seen shot. It is a mosaic of three Apollo 17 35 millimeter shots and shows part of the Orientale Basin. The frames are heavily vignetted, resulting in the outer areas of each image being severely underexposed. Although I corrected for that in terms of brightness, the quality is noticeably worse near the edges.

Click to view attachment

Here are two other frames showing the Orientale area.

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It is today's LPOD.

Very nice indeed, Ted; congratulations!

A bit of a teaser:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26900

"NASA will hold a media briefing at 3 p.m. PST on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008, to unveil a newly restored historic image from the early days of lunar exploration and discuss the innovative processing technique used to retrieve the image. "


I see Charles Byrne is a speaker. He has a couple of nice books out on cleaned-up Lunar Orbiter images. Charles worked at Bellcomm during Apollo, including work on the Lunar Orbiter missions and on the Apollo Site Selection Board - he wrote their minutes, which are held now at LPI in Houston. I had dinner with him one night at Ames this summer... I'm trying to remember if he said anything that might relate to this specific image... it's probably one of the Lunar Orbiter images that was too messed up to use.

Phil

http://www.nasa.gov/290262main_smallversion.png

Yikes - isn't that something?

Phil

Wow, nice! Some more here, although that seems to be the one released image...
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/featur...lery-index.html

Man, what a day... the first portraits of planets beyond our own solar system, and a beautiful new portrait of our own planet too... Just wonderful...

Ahh. Saw K. Cowing on there, and he mentioned more info here:
http://www.moonviews.com

There's a good overview of the background of this interesting archive recovery project at CollectSPACE.

As a historian, I appreciate the comment, "LOIRP's restoration of the Lunar Orbiter images to high resolution will provide the scientific community with a baseline to measure and understand changes that have occurred on the moon since the 1960s."

Steve M

Edit - Correct URL

It turns out that there are two separate ways to get at the archival Lunar Orbiter data. Since around 2000 the USGS has been developing procedures to digitize the data from high resolution scans of the original archival film strips derived from the magnetic tapes. They have added a careful image matching procedure to register overlapping parts of adjacent film strips and have also corrected some of the cosmetic defects found in the originally released images. For a discussion and refs to a series of papers at the LPSI conferences from 2001 to 2007 see this overview from the USGS.

Isn't archival redundancy wonderful. (or is it that NASA doesn't know what the USGS is doing)

Steve M

Yikes - isn't that something?

Yup, but wasn't the rest of that image also processed?

Don

That's a great Earthrise shot and very nicely restored!

Just for fun, here's a quickish colorization : http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/9/14/143...r_Earthrise.jpg

I think that this is a true treasure.
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I was sure that Lunar Orbiter's original tapes missing forever. What a wonderful view, the several palettes filled by tapes.
http://www.moonviews.com/archives/2008/11/...arage.html#more

A bit more background story on the saga of the Lunar Orbiter data tapes.
Here is a recent article from the Post-Standard, the newspaper in Syracuse, NY, relating the involvement of a member of UMSF (yours truly). I am honored to have been a part of the multi-year effort to save the Lunar Orbiter data tapes.
The image in the background is a colorized version of the Lunar Orbiter Earth-Set image, of August 23, 1966. This colorized version was created by Gordan Ukargovic (ugordan) of UMSF.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/200..._effort_to.html


Another Phil

Some interesting handmade image mosaics from Surveyor 7 that I think haven't seen before.

The link is http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar...or7_images.html

Pretty nice! It's like a big puzzle!

http://www.moonviews.com/archives/2009/02/...covery_p_2.html

Modern archaeology

ZOMG!!!

Copernicus

Anxiously awaiting the new high-res scan - this is one of my favorite pictures of all time!

The 2.2 GB image is already available here.

I have seen it and it's impressive, although I cannot use the 16bits TIFF as I would like.

The linked web page is there, but the image link within that web page is now broken.

-the other Doug

I just tried it and it is working.

Maybe it was some temporary problem, try again.

I noticed on another blog that the LOIRP project (http://www.moonviews.com/) is trying to find anyone who has access to hardware or manuals related to Ampex FR-900 series tape recorders. Apparently this was a very special model only used by NASA, FAA and USAF.
Apparently this project is not exclusively concerned with Lunar Orbiter imagery, they are also trying for early Nimbus data.

Thought I should mention it here, since some of our forum members seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of historic space hardware.

I'm looking for that view taken by a hardware (I guess a post-mission Apollo hardware) showing a crescent Earth and a laser spot in its night side.
Does anyone has any idea of what I mean ?

Thanks !

There's an image kinda like that from Galileo.
http://ciclops.org/view/4026/Galileo_Optic...ment_GOPEX?js=1

???? crescent Earth and a laser spot in its night side. ???? -- I have No idea
is it anything like this Apollo 8 Click to view attachment

have you looked here ?
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/SUPPORT_DATA/index.html
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/

That was the Surveyor 7 mission, which landed at Tycho, that photographed the laser beams. I remember seeing a photo that showed two laser spots at once from earth's nightside. I don't know where you would find the photo online, though.

The Surveyor 7 TV image of the two laser beams (from Kitt Peak and Table Mountain) is reproduced on page 80 of Exploring Space with a Camera, NASA SP-168 (which is listed but not scanned as a PDF by the NTRS server). An overexposed version is on page 208 of part 3 of the Surveyor 7 mission report, which does have a scanned (gigantic) PDF here.

OK men, thanks for all, I've finally found it on the web.
No doubt it's possible to post-process it (destripe and uniformize brightness). I'll try it.

By the way, the full Exploring Space with a Camera can be found in pdf here: http://www.archive.org/download/explorings...acewi00cort.pdf

One can read:

The Surveyor photograph of the partially simlit
Earth [top left], is described by C. O. Alley, of the
University of Maryland: "Surveyor VII's TV camera
detected as starlike images two narrow laser beams
sent to the Moon from, respectively, the Kitt Peak
National Observatory, near Tucson, Ariz., and the
Table Mountain Observatory, near Los Angeles.
"The blue-green argon-ion laser beams seen within
the white circle on the photograph each contained
only aboiu 1 watt of power," Alley explained, "but
appeared somewhat brighter than the brightest star,
Sirius.
"This engineering test of the aiming of the beams,
a few miles wide at the Surveyor site, was conceived
and coordinated by me and my fellow-professor
D. G. Currie, of the University of Maryland's Department
of Physics and Astronomy, to gain experience
for the Apollo laser-ranging retroreflector experiment,
for which I am principal investigator."

Here attached the 3 versions of the image.

Strangely, I have the feeling that the first pictures of Earth as seen from the Moon's Surface are those obtained by Surveyor III during the eclipse.
I guess there were several tests before that, but the Surveyor Program Report does not mention them. What is your opinion ?

I believe it was a photographer of LIFE magazine who suggested to add some "color" into the early Surveyor panoramas.
At JPL, hundreds of black-and-white photos were put together on the red concave sides of two half-spheres each three feet in diameter.
The sphere had a hole in the bottom so scientists could put their head into it to see the panorama up close...
Does anyone have a photo of the complete half-sphere, preferably with someone standing near it to get a good idea of the complete thing?

Here's part of the inside:

Surveyor panorama; this gives an idea of the half-spheres concept:

In 1986 I was ten years old and I really started to get interested in space. That year we had the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus, the Challenger disaster and the Giotto flyby of Halley. A very big year in space. 1986 also saw the "Space 86" exhibition in Utrecht. The Dom tower in Utrecht is pretty much the same height as the Saturn V rocket, so that year there was a 1:1 scale model of the mighty Saturn on display at the Dom tower. Yesterday I was at my dad's place and we hunted down the photo we took of it:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/apollo/SaturnV-Dom.jpg (850 KB)

awesome!

That's extraordinary. Did they really actually build a 3-D model, or unroll a long picture of it, or what?

Not sure, but iirc it was a 2D image cleverly shaded to look like a 3D model.

This thread seems generic enough that I can post this here. A map I made of Lunokhod 2's route based on a Soviet era map (Courtesy Jeanna Rodionova)

The route will be corrected now we have LROC images , but it's not too bad.

Phil

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That's in the "Stooke Book" isn't it? I have mine stashed away right now.