I THINK...the Beagle Pan is a 'go'. A full 360 from our current location, L256 and R2..with L2/R2 being a higher priority so likely to come down more quickly. Here's a bunch of the L2's in situ courtesy of MMB.

It should be beautiful, but the pieces are slow to come down. I wonder if something is delaying them.

Well - no night time UHF passes ( Oppy has to deep sleep to save that 100Whr/sol ) - but they saved up on spare flash memory to take the whole thing...it'll come down..it'll just take a while.

As of now - it's all been taken - and tomorrow is a drive sol.



Doug

Here is a part of the Beagle pan taken on Sol 900

with the L2 pancam.

The rest will follow as soon as the images are down.

jvandriel

I like how much of the tracks you can see...it'll be nice in colour when it's down...looks like a sort of 'Lion King Lite' format - 2 frames tall, with extra frames for Beagle.

Doug

Preliminary autostitch L257 full 360 Beagle panorama ( 1/2 size):




Still lots of missing data. Maybe why autostitch "ripped" the image?

Er, I just remembered the funny little movement on sol 904. The movement occurred just before the right side of the pan was done -- so there may be a major problem in stitching this panorama using autostitch. I will try PTAssembler and see what it looks like.

Horton, thanks for the pan - I was looking forward to a full 360!

I have to say that we actually didn't move at all on sol 904 - compare the position of the sundial relative to the ground in this sol 901 view with this sol 905 view.

The view from the navcam sol 904 looked like it had changed a bit, but that must've just been due to the change in pointing angle and the inherent geometrical distortions in the cameras.

Here's my version so far

My final version:

Full 360 degrees:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/mars/Beagle%2...lor%20final.jpg (9.0 MB)

For the bandwith impared a crop of just Beagle Crater:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/mars/Beagle%2...lor%20final.jpg (3.9 MB)

EDIT:

Removed the noise in the sky by using the paintbucket tool in Photoshop, also filled in the black parts of the sky.

Nice work, guys. I liked this panorama so much that I tried it too, but no matter what I tried I could not force Autostitch to completely mend that tear hortonheardawho mentioned. I did manage to minimize it to only one column, and I learned a thing or two about Autostitch in the process, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of several hours.

DeChengst: I really like your colors. You seem to have come very close to what I expect the color will look like after we get the calibrated images.

hortonheardawho: How the heck did you so nicely correct for those missing pieces of data that cause the annoying yellow, cyan, and magenta rectangles? That was a nice touch.

In order to present something different, here is a polar projection of my panorama done with Indian3000's MRC Polar Transform module. Looking at Beagle in all of it's glorious detail, I couldn't help but notice a number of radial fractures extending through the rim that seem to be filled with some dark mineralization. The most obvious one is just in fornt of and to the left of the rover's position. Then, there is that curious rounded bulge of bedrock inside the crater toward the right. I think we saw similar bulges in Endurance and I always wondered if they could be due to some kind of rebound phenomenon.
Click to view attachment

What the heck are you guys talking about!?

I was away when this pan was being taken but there is no motion according to the tracking database for sol 904 and I am not having any problems matching things up. Actually I did have a little bit more of a problem getting the horizon sorted and level than usual - but nothing major - all sorted now I hope . I have never used AutoStitch though...

Does anyone know what Horton ment by "the funny little movement on sol 904"?

Should have my version out soon...

James

Here you go - my version.



I'm on a narrow band connection today so you'll have to wait till tomorrow for the full res version.

Enjoy,

James

Here is the complete L2 panoramic view of Beagle Crater.

Taken on Sol 900 901 and 904.

jvandriel

I got the same problem with Autostitch. I downloaded a lot of panorama software and I found that only PTGui can do panorama's this large right. A lot of software doesn't even manage to come close to a good stitch and just produces utter nonsense. Some programs find the right way to stitch but offer to little control to get a satisfying final result. Truly warped and wavy horizons aren't my cup of tea for example.



I certainly hope so and the good thing is that you just like me need to know nothing about color correction. I just use a quick and dirty trick to get the colors. What I did was select the frame with the best looking colors as the anchor image for color correction in PTGui. I loaded the finished panorama into Photoshop and used a calibrated true color image provided by NASA/JPL as a source for the "Match Color" option.

Things I would like to improve next time:

My horizon is just acceptable. I want to get a real flat horizon next time.

The version of PTGui I used is quite old as it's one that still allows for a full 30 days trial mode instead of the limited watermarked trial the newer versions are. This older version introduces several problems:

It's slow. Real slow. Stitching took almost 13 hours. Also the panorama editor window updates very slowly. Getting the horizon correct is almost impossible this way.

Using the color correction introduces noise into bright and dark areas. Some parts of the horizon don't look very good for example. I'll probably paintbucket the horizon in Photoshop tonight.

It uses a lot of diskspace. It took about 40 GB of space on my HDD. The last version estimates it will only take 4 GB

Problem is I don't have a credit card

Beautiful! Twin peaks deja view.[sic]

Pseudo-polar projection of cropped DEChengst's stitch:

Full resolution version is now online.

One of these days I should get some real panorama software. I'll probably never achieve the geometric precision and color perfection that you pros regularly turn out. I only like to hang out with the experts to pick up little tips here and there. I mainly use the panoramas and other image wizardry as utilitarian tools for making geologic observations, and often perfection is not necessary for that. Still, there is a latent artistic fragment of my brain that has always wanted to create beautiful images. Perhaps one day I will surprise myself. In the meantime, if no one minds me tagging along, I'll try to pick up whatever crumbs I can find along the way.

Lovely mosaic, James. Here some projections:
Click to view attachment Pseudo-polar
Click to view attachment Vertical (12.5 cm/pixel)
Click to view attachment Vertical (2.5 cm/pixel)
Obviusly, vertical projection over a plane makes beagle strongly distorted...