http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000856/
(If this is already somewhere else on this forum please excuse and delete.)

Congratulations Phil. These are stunning. Having taken on some tedious Photoshop projects in the past (but nothing to this extent), I can appreciate the amount of work that went into these. Just amazing.

Gorgeous! I love those.

A job well done Phil. Absolutely beautiful and (easy for me to say) well worth the effort!

I thought it'd be worthwhile to post a link to the old thread where Phil discussed his work with the Surveyor pans. I especially like this post from February of last year with a partially cleaned Surveyor 6 pan.

--Emily

These pan cleanups are great. Really brings back memories..... I was in my early teens back then. No human had walked there as yet.

I truly believe that the Moon is our real stepping stone to the future of human civilizations off Earth. There we will learn how to live as citizens of space.

Thanks Phil for these and thanks Emily for placing these in TPS.

Beautiful work ..

Craig

Superb panoramas !

Take a bow Phil!

Thanks for the nice comments. But wait until you see what I'm working on now!

One thing Emily didn't get into - it's not easy to actually find these raw pans in the first place. You can google all you like. Because they don't look great they were not published outside the technical literature or in any form you can use for this kind of work. The one real exception is the NASA book 'Atlas of Surveyor 5 Television Data'.

I had to visit the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, the Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson and the U. S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff just to find suitable materials to scan. Nobody had a complete set of anything. But between the three places I found one pan from each site and some other materials not shown here - there is a nice morning pan from Surveyor 1, for instance.

Oh well, gotta go - my boss wants me to do some - shudder - Workus McGurkus.

Phil

Phil

I just want to add my thanks and appreciation for those wonderful cleaned-up Surveyor pans, which I avidly followed in old National Geographic magazines. I knew it was do-able but I don't have the skills myself. I'll use them in my talks about early lunar exploration to Science Festivals, astronomy societies etc, if I may

Kenny

Kenny - and anybody else - you are free to use my pans in any presentation or publication. I regard them as being in the public domain, as were the originals. Just give me a credit.

Phil Stooke

Did I ever post this one? I don't think so. It shows what a full resolution Surveyor pan would look like. This is the northern horizon seen from Surveyor 7. This was assembled from individual frames scanned from hardcopy at LPI.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Wow--that crater on the horizon is really cool. Thanks for this, Phil.

--Emily

Man...Phil...You give us so much!

I seem to recall that you had posted a portion of a Surveyor VII pan that you had cleaned up. You may not have posted this one, though.

Emily, I don't think it's really a crater rim we're looking at in the distance -- the entire terrain is really pretty chaotic, and I think these are really ridges that are arrayed radially to Tycho.

However, as chaotic as this terrain is, I'm struck by how *soft* most of the terrain really is. There are a lot of locations in this panorama alone that would be quite suitably flat landing sites for a LM (or some other type of landing module), and the local slopes aren't, for the most part, any greater than what the J-mission Apollo crews worked on with relatively little difficulty.

I wish they had actually tried a J mission to this location. Would have been the most spectacular site ever!

-the other Doug

I seem to remember that far slope that looks like it's got gullies (!) on it, but it's a fabulous image and you can post it as many times as you like, AFAIC. I know that whatever process formed those features was dryer than the proverbial bone, but nonetheless it sends chills down my spine. Whatever you call those features, they're a great object lesson that just because something looks like x doesn't mean it is x.

I just love Phil's Surveryor panoramas, cause I cut my teeth on the JPL TR series mission reports. Gobs of memories.

Regarding the comments about the softness of most of the terrain. The highlands are a "megabreccia" and while a lot of the rock was well-sintered in hot ejecta blankets and some comes from melt-sheets, A lot of the rocks are heavily shocked or poorly-reassembled and rather (as I vaguely recall from Apollo 16) friable. The result is that stuff on the ejecta blanket is probably rather more crumbled in the course of ejection and fallout and impact that we'd assume from smaller, closer-to-everyday-life explosive events.

You want a spectacularly nasty place to land, look at the Lunar Orbiter V images of Tycho's floor..... the soles of my feet hurt just looking at those pics...

I repeat my suspicion that Phil hitched a ride on some top secret test vehicle and simply rephotographed the areas

Well, yeah -- but I'll point out that the same Lunar Orbiter V images of the Tycho area show the Surveyor VII landing site. From orbit, it looks like a complete mess of ropy ridges and sheer cliffs. But from the ground, it becomes apparent that the slopes are, on average, far more gentle than they appear from above.

Our Moon always seems to look rougher and more rugged from orbit than it does from the ground. I don't know if that's a lesson to be learned, or a trap to be avoided, as we head out to explore other Solar System bodies.

-the other Doug

Thanks for the comments.

I'm at LPSC this week, and I spent the morning at the LPI library (skipping the morning sessions, but I did pick up the afternon session on Titan and get to hear volcanopele's talk - very good, jp! At LPI I gave them a poster containing all my Surveyor pans, and a CD with the full resolution digital data. That is supposed to be copied and distributed to other RPIFs soon, and placed online.

Also at LPI I had a chance to look at some Viking site selection stuff, and by chance found a report on the Viking Rover proposed mission - including four sets of example sites plus traverses. And so the Mars atlas takes shape...

Phil

Lunakhod panoramas:
http://selena.sai.msu.ru/Home/Spacecrafts/.../lunokhod1e.htm
http://selena.sai.msu.ru/Home/Spacecrafts/.../lunokhod2e.htm

Some of these are also in Philip Stooke's book "Int Atlas of Lunar Exploration" pages 281-287 and pages 377-379.

Yes, it's true. Dr. Shevchenko graciously allowed me to use material from their website.

But check out the bottom panorama from Lunokhod 2 - it's also to be found in the Lunokhod 1 set. This is an error - it is in fact from Lunokhod 1.

Phil

How do you know it isn't a view that just happened to be exactly the same? Today a student claimed that it was pure coincidence that her 1500 word paper was an exact copy of an essay on a free essays website. She insisted that that she is an honest person and that this is just a really bizarre coincidence. If this is true, who's to say that the panorama is mislabeled?

More Lunar panorama's at Don P Mitchell's website: http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm

Ted is right. I should be more careful.

(was it also a coincidence that her name just happened to be "insert name here"?)


Phil

Who knows? It sounds a lot more likely than a bunch of monkeys typing out a Shakespearian play.

Sadly, I have found "oversights" like that one as well.

I put this together for someone else, but I thought it might be of interest here.

This is a comparison of a circular reprojection of my Surveyor 6 panorama with a Lunar Orbiter 2 image (frame 121-H3 if you're interested). I have labelled twelve points of correspondence, and the location of the lander.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Surveyor 6's Sinus Medii landing site was the most boring of all Surveyor sites. An old, very well gardened regolith with no nearby impacts that had punched through the regolith to bedrock, it left the spacecraft on a regolith plain with few, mostly small rocks to look at. Only the topographic relief on the horizon of a nearby subdued wrinkle ridge helped break the relative monotony.

Surveyor 1 landed on much younger mare, and had more rocks, and a generally fresher, crisper appearance, pluss the hills of the Flamsteed ring on part of the horizon.

Surveyor 3 and 5 landed in and partly in craters, and 7 on the Tycho ejecta blanket.

I still want to see the floor of Tycho from a lander. Look at that at FULL resolution in the Lunar Orbiter 5 hi-rez images and boggle.

Good tip... it's quite a *clink*

"Good tip... "
That's a decent version of the image, a bit lacking in clarity though the de-striping has improved the cosmetics a bit... the resolution is nowhere near the max of the Lunar Orbiter data.

That incredible tortured terrain, unsoftened except at the 10 cm's scale (according to Surveyor 7's view of start of formation of regolith on the ejecta blanket) (but also enhanced by the long shadows of the low sun during imaging) is one version of what every large crater's floor looked like originally.

Compare the still fairly fresh but clearly blurred floor of Copernicus, and something like Eratosthenes.