A while back, I tried to clean up Stardust's moon image... I now have a much better version. Removing the blur from the scum on the lens was a pain!

Here is an "official" version.




Here is my version. [Note - an improved version is lower down in this thread]

Wow! Great job cleaning that up Ted.

That's a beautiful job of cleaning up the image.

However, I believe that the image has been reversed, i.e.,
you have a mirror-image on your hands.



Another Phil

Stardust's Navigation Camera optics include a periscope with a Mirror - so yet....it is mirrored

To put it mildly Ted...how the hell did you do that

Doug

I got rid of the actual image for each frame, and generated a mask that was "pure blur" then I subtracted it. I did a bit of super-resolution processing, but the primary reason for stacking all the good images in the set was to build the image back up, since the grayscale was, um, strained.

Some of the images, if you look at them closely, were quite good under the haze. For example, this one:



Here is an improved version.



Stacking the image took a bit of re-projection, because NAVCAM is acutally a Cassini wide angle camera, so there is a lot of time between frames.

Ted

Ahhh... the rapid-fire mechanism of the Cassini cameras...
I'm curious - how do you perform your reprojections? Custom made or some other software?

Depends...if it is severe difference, one has to project the image on to a virtual globe and make the central meridians match. In cases where it isn't too severe, a little pushing and pulling will work, except on limbs, which usually don't end up working anyway, unless you have a good 3-D topography model or a world that is really flat.

What it interesting with this kind of job, is that it could enhance images of unknown objects, instead of the weel known Moon. Perhaps Cassini images of Titan ground?

I have looked into that. But the difference there is that the blurring is more complex...it is travelling through multiple layers, rather than just being blurred by fog on the lens. And there are a lot of other complexities. But this view is a fairly neat angle, looking at the lunar South Pole with Schrodinger just to the left of center on the terminator.

Here is a cleaner version (I have been working on this for a long time, but every time I look at it, I see something else to tweak.

Or Stardust images of Wild 2

Wild 2 is harder, because since it does have jets and a tail, it is hard to distinguish one type of blur for another. At any rate, the situation was much less severe at Annefrank and Wild2 compared to the moon.

Yes - they baked the hell out of the optics to clear the contamination away - I found the Wild 2 images to be just about OK

Doug

The Annefrank images appeared pretty clear too. The apparent blur is due to the fact that the original images are so tiny.

A long time ago Ted Stryk asked my to post the version of the Stardust lunar image I am using in my atlas. Ted, I'm sorry to take so long, things are rather crazy around here right now, and only recently have I been able to go back and clear up some outstanding things.

When I say outstanding, I mean overdue, not a great picture. Ted's version is far superior. In this case I'm printing this so small that quality was not a big issue. I have fudged the darkness of the maria to give a better impression of them in the very small image on the page.

Phil

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