Yes, they do, don't they? Nice work, Olivier.

I love the 'warm' look that vidicon images have which you just don't get from CCD. It's like being a vinyl aficionado.

Region from Argyre Planitia to the Thaumasia Fossae from Viking Orbiter 1:

machi!
that is so beautiful -- your mastery of stitching and blending those 36 images is inspiring!
thanks for sharing your work!

Aaand that's another Daniel Machacek work that's gone straight to my blog. You make my job easy

Amazing picture, machi! Love the view of the atmospheric haze with the surface. Great color.

Daniel, there are no words.

Gorgeous!

Wow, just wow!!

Always Argyre...

Stunning Daniel, just stunning.

A feast for the eyes, Viking comes alive, it's such a careful treatment of a spectacular view, thanks for sharing.

What a GREEEEEAT pic Machi ! Thanks a lot for sharing with us. You deserve 5 wheels

Thanks to all!

With all my Vikings mosaics and animations, I reduced number of images in my folder with favorite Viking images from ~2250 to ~2100,
so there is still what to do.

Possibly the best Viking mosaic of Mars I have ever seen. You mention that as part of the processing the images were warped. Was this done to correct for the vidicon distortion or to make it possible to mosaic them without getting ugly seams?

Spacecraft motion between frames?

Phil

"Was this done to correct for the vidicon distortion or to make it possible to mosaic them without getting ugly seams?"

Vikings vidicons had relatively small geometric distortion (compared to previous Martian mission Mariner 9). So I did warping only for mosaicking and resizing (bUnwarpJ does both things in one process). Only problems are with corners, which have most severe geometric distortion. So if possible, I used central parts from overlapping images, which have lowest geometric distortion.

"Spacecraft motion between frames?"

It looks, that spacecraft motion between frames was relatively low. After all, Viking was in higher (and slower) part of his orbit.

Isis does not provide enough metadata for a fine and automatic warping then registration ?

It's hard to map project an image when two corners are in space.

Sure it's harder, but... not that much, it's still geometry basics. I thought Isis could handle those cases.
Thanks for the information, it's good to know.

Congrats machi, the image is really great ! I love the details in the atmosphere...

"Isis does not provide enough metadata for a fine and automatic warping then registration ?"

I don't use ISIS. I haven't LINUX yet (at home), but I want them (LINUX+ISIS) for my new computer (not for mosaicking, but for 3D modeling - shape from shade etc.).

Conway Snyder (Viking Project Scientist at JPL) had a fascination for the Tharsis Plateau. In 1978, he ordered VO-1 to take some specific images in order to build a great mosaic of this spectacular geological feature. But VO-1 needed two passes to take the full perspective. The images were taken during orbits 753 and 759...

Now, you can see the perpective fully processed : an unusual and spectacular view of Mars taken from almost above its topmost point : Olympus Mons. In the far distance, Valles Marineris is stretching towards the horizon and vanishes among mists, dust layers and clouds. The weather was cloudy above some places and Conway was not so happy at 1st glance : he expected crystal clear pictures everywhere. He let Marcia Neugebauer, his "wizard" deputy for imagery, built a crude mosaic : he was so happy with the result that he had it published in a JGR issue...
Now thanks to modern computer techniques, you can see Conway Snyder's perspective revisited with the pictures fully processed and pasted together. Of course, not with Marcia's glue... The size of the mosaic is reduced 50% to fill inside the UMSF forum.

Enjoy this work dedicated to :
- Conway Snyder http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=179235 ,
- Marcia Neugebauer : most Viking Orbiter mosaics done for Press releases at JPL (the beautiful ones printed on glossy photographic paper -now collectibles-), were built by Marcia ;
- and the Planetary Society (for which Conway was a much involved member, starting from TPS' very origins)
Click to view attachment

... Although the images were taken as panchromatic filtered pics, and because of some UMSF friends personal requests, here is the colourized version of the mosaic (using multiple-layers colouring). Enjoy !
Click to view attachment


... and let me dedicate this mosaic to our UMSF forum "Cartographer-in-Chief" : Phil Stooke, who deserves so oftenly our congratulations for his work and for sharing it with us.

It's gorgeous!

"The size of the mosaic is reduced 50% to fill inside the UMSF forum."

I think, that you can send full resolution image to Emily's "Amateur Space Imaging" site. It would be very nice addition.

"and let me dedicate this mosaic to our UMSF forum "Cartographer-in-Chief" : Phil Stooke, who deserves so oftenly our congratulations for his work and for sharing it with us."

I totally agree!

Merci! It's beautiful.

Phil

Thanks a lot and good idea ! I'll do it when the previous images I sent a while ago are published inside the "Amateur Space Imaging" site. I think they are overburied with work and cannot take more huge images now. No problem : I'll wait then

This appears to be a new global color Viking image mosaic. Too big for me to handle, so I look forward to seeing what others do with it! The browse preview looks quite lovely.

Mars Viking MDIM21 Color Global Mosaic 232m/p

unfortunately the usgs servers are maxing out at about 300Kb/ sec (with about 200K as the average)
at 12 gig this is a 12 hour dl on a 30 meg cable connection

Emily, just an idea, please. Could there be a downloadable version of this gorgeous map put online by TPS on its website as JPEG images : 1 global half resolution + 2 hemispheres left/right full res (to be mosaicked by users if needed) ? This would be a real help much appreciated from us as TPS members... Thanks so much again in advance if you can find a solution, please, and with warmest regards, VM

I don't plan on hosting the full-resolution data, but with the help of Fred Calef I have posted here a version with a resolution of 2.5 km/pixel in PNG format, suitable for serving as the base of a global map. It is 52 MB and 8536 pixels wide.

what do you know the dl speed of the cub is now at 1.9 M/s
2 hours VS 12 hours

but this is just a colorized version of the same mdim basemap
good for making a control network for the themis data and CTX images

Thanks a lot Emily : this is very kind of you. I'll try to downloand it tonight at home.

One of my long-running projects has been reprocessing Viking Orbiter mosaics. One of my eventual goals is to recreate the mosaics featured in Viking Orbiter Views of Mars. The data's pretty great when it's cleaned up and frames assembled digitally, so I think it'd be great to see an "updated" version of that book. I have a growing Flickr gallery of completed mosaics. I'll post a couple of my favorites here.

One of the southern hemisphere monitoring mosaics, centered on the Argyre Basin:



The famous regional shot of Chryse Planitia showing water-sculpted features:



The Tharsis Plateau:

The global dust storm of 1977 while it was still a regional dust storm in Thaumasia, taken on February 19, 1977.


Thaumasia Dust Storm - Viking Orbiter 2 by Justin Cowart, on Flickr

Here's a 5-frame color mosaic of Chryse Planitia from Viking Orbiter 1 about a month before the landing. Looks quite dusty!

Here's a 15-frame mosaic of the region northwest of Hellas Basin. There is a missing chunk at top center that appears to have been filled in with the official NASA release of this image, but I'm not sure where they pulled the data from. A neat feature that the official version misses is some high-altitude clouds along the horizon at the bottom left corner.


Mars - Viking Orbiter 1 - Rev 1483 Full by Justin Cowart

It amazes me home much we missed back in the 80s!

Well done!!


Its also nice to see the correct colour and not the blood red over saturated images of the 80s.

That's gorgeous image Justin!

Stunning. The wide-field views of Mars from the VOs are still some of the most dramatic and beautiful ever captured.

This is an awesome mosaic and one thing I like is that this is not a low phase view. Examining the terminator in hi-res global views of planetary bodies is usually interesting. It would be particularly interesting to see hi-res global views of Mars at high phase angles - the limb/atmosphere would be interesting in these views (anyone from the MOM team reading this ? ;-)).

Here's a Viking Orbiter scan across Mars, centered on Syria Planum. Relatively dust-free view of the southern Tharsis region, as the albedo variations on the surface are pretty bold and sharp. Also lucky enough to have imaged some orogenic clouds over Arsia Mons.

Stunning view as always, jccwrt! But please note that the volcano visible is Ascraeus Mons.

Thanks for the correction, I've updated the flickr description of the image.

Somewhere in the northern hemisphere in November 1978. Metadata isn't helpful in figuring out exactly where. I have a hunch that the large crater in the lower left corner is Lomonosov, but there are so few surface features visible that I can't confirm.



View over Vastitas Borealis looking towards the north pole in September 1979

Your hunch is correct. Lomonosov is the largest crater. Kunowsky is the other one at upper right (due south of Lomonosov). Very faintly visible to clinch the identification are a crater at lower left (due north of Lomonosov) and a cluster of small features just south of Kunowsky.

Phil

Thanks Phil!

Some Viking color mosaics I've worked on over the few months:

South pole monitoring, August 11, 1977:


Lunae Planum and Valles Marineris, April 11, 1978:


Tharsis Montes, June 24, 1978:


North pole monitoring, July 29, 1978:


Noachis Terra, April 9, 1980:


Terra Sabaea, April 12, 1980:

I've been experimenting with a trial and error method to get pseudo-true color mosaics from single-color RED filter mosaics. Given that most of the surface albedo information is contained in the red portion of the spectrum, I've been creating synthetic blue images by dramatically reducing the contrast, manually brighten the horizon to simulate scattering, adding topography back in by overlaying a high-pass filtered red image, and then creating a synthetic green image by some blend of the red and blue images. It's not the most scientific method, but I think it does get close and is a nice quick way to see Mars in color.

My first attempt was with a large mosaic of Valles Marineris:

Valles Marineris synth color - Viking Orbiter 1 - Orbit 663 - 04-11-78

Modifying my process a bit, I assembled this 36 frame southern hemisphere monitoring mosaic.

Viking Orbiter 2 - Southern Hemisphere Monitoring

The original black and white version of the second mosaic is also on my flickr page.

Great work Justin, I tried this idea before and came up so short.

At first glance I thought it was a true rgb image!

They are really nice. It's good to see the beautiful Viking data still in use - I remember how amazing it seemed when all we had before was Mariner 9. Color imaging sure has come a long way since the 70s!

Phil