And a second set from Dec 15th

Definitely more varied material to work with than usual, will have to force myself to attempt improving the flatfield one of these days.

Composite of Valles Marineris and Argyre Planitia (and all the cool-o stuff in between) from December 23, 2009 MEX-VMC images:

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Full resolution and detailed processing methods here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4230483496/

-Mike

Mars Express, baby!

Image Capture at Mars: January 11, 2010 at 01:43 UTC
Image Arrival on Earth & Post to MEX-VMC Blog: January 11, 2010 04:11 UTC
Image processed and posted to Flickr: January 12, 2010 01:20:53 UTC

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Nice impressive detail of the upper atmosphere clouds!

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This is Image 57 with the limb masked out and Image 58 underneath it. Very little additional color balancing was done. Processing details here.

Very cool stuff, Mike!

Dear VMC comunity,
My name is Hannes Griebel and I work on the Mars Express Flight Control team. I am a spacecraft engineer and mission planner. Your excellent work has inspired me to spend some free time of my own processing VMC images. So far my image composites are only uploaded to my facebook account, as I have no flickr account (yet).

To improve things, I have recently taken an image north of Alba Mons in an attempt to create a flat fielding correction of the brightness variation across VMC images.
The reason why I chose this region is because it has a comparatively high albedo and is relatively smooth and featureless. Plus, a close-range VMC observation was scheduled anyway for northwest of Alba M. on January 14th, so it required no extra effort to squeeze the shot in. The relevant images are the first 17 of the set acquired on that day.

A calibration base file was chosen, which I converted into a grayscale and removed noise through averaging.
The gray-scale was then used to flat-field the raw VMC images, even before running the latest vmc2rgb. This procedure yielded the best results. Flatfielding an image after vmc2rgb processing did not yield quite as nice results, but also showed an improvement.

Image 10-014_17.42.41_VMC_Img_No_5.png yielded the best results of all calibration shots. One disadvantage of the image is that due to the spacecraft's inertial pointing mode, a tiny bit of limb is visible in the upper right hand corner, but from all tested shots it delivered the best results. An attempt to stack all calibration exposures with RegiStax did not yield better results, but since there is a lot more that can be done here and my knowledge in the field is limited, I leave it to someone else to optimize the brightness correction flat field. I believe it can get a lot better!

Here is my preliminary calibration flat field:
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Here is an "unmolested" VMC raw image (only saved as PNG so it can be shown here). It's no.27 from the set acquired on December 29th, 2010:
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Here is the image after processing as described:
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And this is the image after converting the so corrected RAW with vmc2rgb into a png:
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I'd be delighted to hear your opinion on the calibration shot and whether it works for you as well. If someone manages to provide a better version, I'd be naturally very happy to see it, as I am no image processing expert and can only marvel at the outstanding work published in this forum. Also, the time I have to spare for such things is unfortunately very limited. So I am certain that someone can do a much better job.

Until then, feel free to use my calibration image provided here at your leasure. It is in no way connected to my professional work in interplanetary space flight.

Have fun and keep it up! Your work is brilliant and much appreciated here at ESOC.
Hannes.

Thank you Hannes!!!

Following up on my last, here is an image composition of the Tharsis region, made from two recent observations. Map projection is cylindrical and annotated.
The individual images were processed as described in my earlier post. The so obtained pngs were then treated to noise removal by averaging, contrast enhanced, saturation enhanced and unsharpened. The images were then map projected and assembled. This was done manually since I do not have a software to do that for me (hence the brightness variations across the composite).

Here is the result:
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Have fun,
Hannes.

Here comes the globe projection of the same composite.

Note that Tharsis has a very high albedo and a very "shiny" surface. Check out the specular reflection near Alba Mons.

The horizon by the way doe not match because the first series of pictures shows the terminator, which merges with the limb right in that frame.

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The globe was obtained from Google Earth in Mars mode and shows MOLA images. The context map with ground tracks was obtained from a special ESA mission planning tool referred to as MAPPs and also shows a MOLA elevation map. MAPPs is not available to the general public. It is a specialized mission planning tool for Mars Express.

Cheers,
Hannes.

I actually see what looks like two specular reflections, Hannes. Might those be from high-altitude ice (H2O or CO2) crystal clouds?

They are indeed specular reflections, not ice clouds. Very well spotted! The albedo is very high and the terrain very smooth in that area.

Cheers,
Hannes.

Here is another another annotated composition I made. It shows the area around Huygens crater and Hellas. The horizon circle doesn't match because the spacecraft moved away from the planet as the pics were taken, and in late December when I made that composite I didn't know how to correct for map projection. I obviously also didn't know how to use the vmc2rgb with flat fielding. :-)

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This composition was also made in December, but already map projected. It shows the area around Newton crater, and shows the terminator. No flat fielding here either. Saturation and contrast were enhanced though and noise removed.

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This is the first half of the Tharsis composite I posted earlier. I made this composition after it was downloaded from Mars.
Added here for good measure, it also shows the terminator. Map projection is not 100% correct though.


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And finally a medium range composite, made from two images acquired a fortnight or so ago. It very nicely shows the heavily cratered southern hemisphere and Hellas.

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Interesting. I'm totally going to tell my grandkids to look out for this when they orbit Mars.

Here are two versions with suppressed brightness variations, also getting rid of the specular reflections. The CCD isn't really overexposed in those areas so some picture information can be recovered.

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Here is the cylindrical map projection so processed:

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Hi all!

First off thanks to Hannes for his work on the VMC images, it proves that they can be just as interesting for us working on the mission as for everyone else! We're hoping to post his work soon on the blog, as with any public submission.

I just wanted to get in touch to highlight the VMC observation which took place last Saturday (http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/972)..we think we've managed to observe the shadow of Phobos crossing the planet as it transits between the Sun and Mars. I've added a special post about this here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/973 and you can see the full resolution version of my little animation here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/gallery/6/...sit_Anim_TO.gif.

We're always impressed by the results from UMSF so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you make of these images, and of course seeing if we can confirm that what we see really is Phobos (I've checked and think the size, speed and direction seem right)! If I get some nice results I'll put together a special post highlighting everyone's work. As always, it's your discovery, the amateur community of VMC are our scientists so lets see what we can get!

Neato, Thomas! Here's my version.

For the rest of you, I just exchanged emails with Thomas about the point of view of these images -- he told me "the light splat is Argyre Planitia and the chain of 4 craters coming away from it are (from left to right): Lohse, Helmholtz, Wirtz and (my personal favourite) Galle."

(Galle is, of course, the famous Smiley Face crater.)

Amazingly, there was a contemporaneous uplooking photo from Argyre, taken with the amazing SNCam (umm, that would be "Starry Night" Camera), showing the Sun, Phobos, Earth, Moon and Venus in a cosmic right triangle. (SNCam has no difficulty seeing faint celestial objects in the daytime through the dust...)

Wow, that's a great camera, I wish we had more of those!

MEX VMC thumbnails from Feb 11 onwards are now in color!
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/991

Was wondering how long it would take someone to notice Yep...the VMC shots are now in full colourful glory! They've actually been colour for quite some time - we've been using ugordan's excellent vmc2rgb v2 tool - but originally the software we wrote didn't do any enhancement so the images were (as I'm sure you're all too familiar with!) very very low saturation and basically looked almost grayscale.

With the work done by our amateur community (and in a large part UMSF!) we've learnt some ways that the "inadequacies" of VMC can be overcome systematically. This started with ugordan's brilliant addition of flat fielding to vmc2rgb, which we didn't use straight away because I needed to track down the problem of the pixel shift which hit some images (now fixed!). I also wanted to find a way of putting the channel mixing techniques into our software...which I eventually managed to work out, along with a touch of saturation boosting and unsharp masking.

All in all I think the end result is pretty good, not quite as good as hand-processed images but good for an automated process! I'm going to write a proper post about it early next week, crediting of course all the work put in by you at UMSF, it's really in the spirit of what we're aiming for with VMC that the improvements come from our amateur community and improve the images for everyone! Thank you to everyone who's made this happen...and enjoy the new images!

Does that mean I don't have to update the software to figure that out and correct it automatically?

Sure thing...sorry ugordan, that was my mistake...I'm the one who needed to correct it There shouldn't be any more images with the pixel shift - although it'll take a while before we can update the archive with the new raws I'm afraid.

Hey, these things happen. I messed up a fair share of Cassini images myself with subtle bugs in my software


Normally, I'd say don't bother as it would be faster to implement a software fix instead, but I'm a bit uneasy about the method I had in mind. I.e. if it could produce some other unwanted side-effects.

Yeah, I think it's best to do the whole archive systematically because it corrects a "wiggle" in the images that you can actually see stepping through old image sets that have the bug - the planet jumps sideways from one image to the next due to the pixel shift. On top of that I'd also like to get the whole library redone with the new processing methods, I'll work out an automated update method and then set it running on the archive. Thanks as always for the help though!

More limb shots with clouds in cross section!

http://webservices.esa.int/blog/resource/6/12034

EDIT: Tried a quickie technique of taking the one image (No. 7), flipping it, then subtracting it out to cancel the bright limb, then adding in slightly the original image. Clouds enhanced, but ignore all surface features, they are artifacts of the subtraction process.

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Hi all!

Things have been a little quiet on VMC of late (but I see you were all enjoying our Phobos campaign not so long ago!) but we've been preparing something a little special and it's my pleasure to announce that it's now live on the VMC blog.

On Mars Express orbit 8194, 27th May 2010, we commanded the spacecraft to capture VMC images at the maximum rate for an entire 7 hour elliptical orbit of Mars Express. The images were captured at two exposure settings, alternating between brighter and darker, producing a total of 300 images at each exposure setting.

We've managed to upload all this and generate some rough movies from the sequence in time for the 7th anniversary of the Mars Express launch today. As always with VMC the full raw dataset has also been posted on the website so go ahead and download it! For those who don't know, the blog can be found here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/blog/6.

At the top of the blog you can see one of our first videos of the sequence and then the two part post below ("New Images From 27 May 2010 Added") shows the full image sequence and gives you the link to download the raw data.

There are loads more details on the website so do take a look, but we've always been so impressed with the quality of the work by UMSF that we thought we would give you a special heads-up. Enjoy looking through the images and as always send us your interpretations of the data at the usual address (look at the "Help us with VMC" section of the VMC website for more details). Whether these are arty, technical, scientific or educational...still photo or video...send them over and we'll publish the best.

Above all enjoy this exciting new Mars Express observation!

Oh wow. That's nice. Please pass along thanks to your team for those.

All I'm going to say is: WOW!

That's great! And you even caught Phobos zipping by at the end. I tried clicking to enlarge a few of the later image thumbnails but that didn't work. (Maybe it's not supposed to?? - I don't really want to download all 40 Mb though.)

There's a superfluous quotation mark at the end of the thumbnail links, you can manually delete it until they fix it.

Fixed! Thanks for the quick catch on that one!

As you can imagine this is quite a lot larger (~10 times) than any other set we've posted to the blog before so it required a bit of manual wrangling with the posts to get it to all display

My attempt at overdramatisation in putting the video on YouTube (not to worry, everyone got credited appropriately).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPvvVj50FeM...player_embedded

That's just...just...

LOVE it. Thanks!!!

Wow! Beautifully done, everyone!

Very chuffed by this...

http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/1189

Haha! Very nice!

Emily posted a nice animated sequence of August 8th's MEX-VMC images of the Martian North Pole: http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002618/

Me likee polar cap shots. Here is an image comparison between an image from the August 8, 2010 MEX-VMC set and an earlier image of the North pole taken on May 27, 2010. Cropped and coordinated for comparison:

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(Changes are evident, especially near Chasma Boreale)

I couldn't resist...I tried to estimate areal coverage change of ice....

So, ignoring things like lighting direction, phase angle, and perspective differences, I used the magic wand and a series of Photoshop semi-manual selections/deselections to make a very subjective estimate of what is ice covered and what isn't inside a defined region (red border).

Results below:
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First line shows original MEX-VMC image, second line shows the ice coverage "mask" inside the defined region, third line shows the defined region, and the mask.
The ice coverage inside the region changed from 53% to 65% in just a little over 2 months. This is a 25% increase in areal extent of ice (non-projection corrected).

Hooray for the VMC team being recognized by Europlanet!!

I was gutted when they didn't win the main prize, but I'm very very glad to see them get the recognition they deserve

Love these words from the steering committee

"The OSC hopes that the mention in 2010 will encourage ESA and other space agencies to follow this example more widely and consider the use of raw images for outreach purposes from the planning stages of missions!"

Wow... I'm sure we all hope that too...

Well done all the VMC team, great Outreach work!

A really nice low-phase angle lower elevation pass over Mars just got posted on the MEX-VMC website:
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/1283

(Scrolling the view up and down with your mouse wheel gives a pretty cool effect!)

Two large clouds just downwind of Alba Mons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/5174953020/
Raw images here: http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/1286

Article describing Mars Express VMC camera and lotsa shout-outs to UMSF members and the amateur community in general!

T. Ormston, M. Denis, D. Scuka, and H. Griebel, Acta Astronautica Volume 69, Issues 7-8, September-October 2011, 703-713. "An ordinary camera in an extraordinary location: Outreach with the Mars Webcam". doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2011.04.015.

(Pay-for article: abstract available here)

Science!

Scientific use of the MEX-VMC instrument to help put CO2 clouds in context!

Check out:
Schulster et al., EPSC 6 (2011), Abstract EPSC-DPS2011-706-1. "Support to the CO2 Cloud Observations by Mars Express
with the VMC Visual Monitoring Camera" freely available here.