This is my latest attempt to clean up the classic Phobos over Mars image from Phobos 2. One thing that makes Phobos 2 images especially hard to deal with is the 505x288 CCD arrangement with very rectangular pixels forcing considerable stretching on the 288 pixel axis to make a correctely shaped image. Additionally, they suffer buildup like DIMES images from the MERs, but often to the point of saturation. The color frames don't line up perfectly, so some cropping is required. In some images (not this one, the color images were taken so far apart that Mars and Phobos had moved relative to each other so you have to drag Phobos back into place. I still have some tweaking to do, but here is my latest attempt.

Sounds like a lot of work Are the relative albedos of Mars and Phobos about right there?

Doug

Approximately. Due to CCD buildup, Phobos may be brightened a bit by Mars. I will attach the blue channel image to this post and the red channel image to my next post.

red

The sad thing is that that is a good VSK data set. Here is an example of one of the worse ones. I had to generate basic color from the one good corner of the red image, and then make Phobos gray. It really was a horrible camera.