I've been struggling all evening, to manipulate the full size version on my poor old computer.

Now it's getting late, so it'll have to wait. In the meantime here is a lower resolution (about 1/4) first draft.

Click to view attachment

I believe that with this done that is full mission success for SSI. Congrats Mark!

James

Beautiful! It is amazing to see the full site. I can't wait until the PDS release, when I can go to work on the horizon.

Very nice work James. And this wouldn't look out of place on the cover of a science fiction paperback from 50 years ago!

Wow James!
Here's your image as the coolest of cool Polar_Polar Pans. A Polar Peter Pan perhaps!
Can't wait until we see this filled in....extra cool!
Click to view attachment
Astro0

Well done James (and well done Mark)! This is one of the things we have been waiting for. When we get the full res I'm, probably going to print it on a polymer film and make a real wallpaper out of it for the side wall of my study.

Thanks guys

Absolutely stunning!
Compliments to jamescanvin and congratulations to the SSI team and 3 cheers for Peter Smith for making this all possible.

Do they plan to fill in the lower tiers?

I don't see why not. This is not the actual complete pan, yet.

"Phoenix camera team leader Mark Lemmon cautioned me that the mission success panorama isn't really quite done.... they plan on filling in the terrain nearest the lander, which includes the robotic arm's workspace".http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001522/

That has got to be the cleanest of all the polar pans we've done around here. I could gaze at that all day.

Stunning job, guys. There's something eerie about that disembodied robotic arm floating there, too.

A random, meaningless point on some near-featureless, empty, frozen northern plains on an entirely uninhabited planet - which has now become the centre of the universe for a vast, varied team of people. Fantastic!

(It reminds me a little of the Degree Confluence Project - precise locations you'd never give a second glance gaining some strange significance through external factors. This odd little spot on Mars, seemingly identical to its surroundings for many, many kilometres, is now important. And will be photographed, prodded, dissected and analysed, because everywhere is interesting.)

I played around with the hills a bit. Considering the quality of the data, they are remarkably featureless.

Click to view attachment

Not surprising considering flatfield noise, jpeg compression artifacts and plain dust in the air.

It is just that hills at other landing sites were so much rockier, even in poor quality imaging.

That's probably because these are more distant than say the Pathfinder Twin Peaks.

That's quite possible. I really don't know the scale. It will be interesting to see once better quality imaging is down.

I'm not sure about Twin Peaks, but the low hills in tedstryk's post above are about 20 km to the SSW. There's a large crater a similar distance to the SW of the Columbia Hills - this shot shows it:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...M9P2629L6M1.JPG
Of course its visibility varies a lot with dust levels. Here's a more recent winter view with clear air:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...00P2264L7M1.JPG

Another draft. I added in the arm work volume mosaic from the first week, unfortunately they don't quite overlap.

Also available at twice the resolution compared to yesterdays (half of full)



Enjoy.

James

And James' updated panorama deserves another polar projection.
Click to view attachment
Astro0

Many thanks for the great work!

Michael

Amazing works James and other. Really appreciate it .
James : how do you do to take the time to do this pictures? You are really productive this time.

Version updated to sol 32, it's already out of date with all the sol 33 images. But at least it's now at full resolution.



James

Really nice job! Yah - SOL 33 gives you that steenkeen 2 degrees!

Paul

Awesome work, James! Can't wait to see what the final panorama will look like!

James' pan as a polar, and I vote it as a new 'emoticon'! SMILE
Click to view attachment
Astro0

Or how about as a "don't panic" emoticon? There's something oddly familiar about that polar image... (Or perhaps just something odd about me...)

Great imagery James Canvin & Astro0.

Wonder how they'll compare to the official ones that will be released by NASA? My own thoughts are that the first 360 pans should have been the priority for the first few sols, before unstowing the arm & digging. That arm is quite an intrusion.

Can I ask, what software was used & is it expensive?

Thank you.

Andrew Brown.

The arm adds a certain je ne sais quoi for me. In retrospect, maybe the first Spirit panorama should have had the arm outstretched and pointing toward the Columbia Hills a la Babe Ruth, as if to say, "There. That's where we're going".

Happy Canada Day everyone!

Brian

Thanks.



Having the arm moving about is not too much of a problem. They have already retaken a few of the images in the near field when the arm was in the way the first time.



I use Hugin to stitch the images (free open source ) and usually the GIMP to post-process (touch up saturation/brightness etc, add credits, save as jpg, etc.) (free open source ) However for really big images like full resolution 360 degree pans the GIMP really struggles and I then use Photoshop which can handle these much better.

All the matching between frames is done using a program I have written myself from scratch which while has not cost me anything in monetary terms has cost me more time than I even want to think about over the years!

James

I was trying to manipulate some large images (planet texture maps 21k pixels wide) & the ImageMagick library on a RAM-challenged old Linux box was just crashing. There's a JPEG2000 format or something which is supposed to facilitate handling large images at differing crops and resolution, but I haven't looked into that. A simple (although slow) stopgap was to create a much bigger swap file so there was enough virtual memory, & it eventually chugs through (in that case splitting the big file up into tiles).

( unnecessary full quote removed )

Thank you very much for your answers James. Very much appreciated. I must try & few more things myself. I will be keeping an eye out for further interesting images.

( unnecessary off topic question removed )

Andrew Brown.

Do they plan to send back a panorama composed of lossless images like they did with Pathfinder later in that mission?

There is a plan is to conduct a lower compression, more filters, less down-sampling pan as I understand it ( called the Re-Peter Pan ) Of course, with Pathfinder, it had 1/16th the resolution to contend with.

Doug

Hi Doug,

That is going to take some time & a huge number of frames. Is there enough time left in the Primary Mission to accomplish that?

What would be interesting would be a horizon pan at around the time of the Midnight Sun, do determine atmospheric light scattering, etc.

Andrew Brown.

A crude attempt at filling in the deck and panels using the ground-based test images.
The real thing should be spectacular!
Click to view attachment
Astro0

WOW! Beautiful job, Astro0!

Great job Astro - I'm still working on getting the deck pan added to The Peter Pan

Doug - Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the name Re-Peter Pan was just applied to the the repeated bits of Peter Pan where there were dropouts in the data the first time around.

Andrew - yes it will take quite a long time - it depends just how much compression and how many filters are used - but I could imagine the horizon pan being done by the end of the primary mission.

Ahh- that makes more sense.

Doug

The full colour version is going to be tricky to pull off I think, however in the meantime here is a quick greyscale version. 144 images in this!



Polar version



Click image - quarter of full resolution

James

Awesome work, James!

Agreed. It's great James .

Well... As long as you eventually get the colored version completed, James...before the end of next week. J/k

Good work on those greyscale images

James, you are a wizard!

BBC's The Sky at Night did a great job - sent Chris Lintott out to Tuscon for a day or two and had a brilliant half hour program on BBC4 just now.

I noticed something in the background of an interview....

Click to view attachment

Notice anything cool? A nice big print out of an early chunk of the Peter Pan in there.

But it's not the NASA version - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/...AAM2_newer.html - see, no black borders.

It's this one - http://www.nivnac.co.uk/mer/index.php/2008...1bc-6-pointings

It's JC's mosaic on the wall at PHX HQ.

Like an art insurance specialist - it's all about the border A flick comparison for added 'Bloody hell, you're right'

There you go James - that's twice you've been on the Sky at Night now

Pan on the wall at Phoenix HQ and on Sky at Night at the same time. Doesn't get much better than that!

I notice that in the first shot from inside the HQ at the start of the program you can see it on the left on the other side of the room. Gives a bit of context to it's location.

James

Here's The Sky at Night on iPlayer for anyone who missed it. Needs a British IP address to get around the geolocatory restrictions - I'm in Belgium, but know how to fake it. ;-)

And also in the latest issue of The Economist, afaik.

On their website at least, it's the official NASA version, not mine.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayst...ory_id=11662574

ah, ok.