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The Planetary Society WeblogBy Emily Lakdawalla
Aug. 27, 2008 | 11:30 PDT | 18:30 UTC Ustream chat with Lou Friedman -- sadly, no recordingDespite some initial technical difficulties I got today's Ustream chat running, pulling our esteemed leader Lou Friedman in to the broadcast from his own Webcam as a Ustream "cohost." Sadly, though, the "record" feature on Ustream did not appear to record any of Lou's signal -- it just recorded half an hour of my webcam, that is, video of me sitting quietly and typing messages to Lou. So I am very sorry to report that his broadcast is not archived in anyway that you can see or hear. I am contacting Ustream to see if the failure to record the cohost signal is a bug or a feature. Aug. 27, 2008 | 10:56 PDT | 17:56 UTC Pictures from the past: Viking 2 approaches MarsOn Monday I pointed to the awesome new website for the VMC instrument on Mars Express and mentioned that the camera can get views of Mars in a crescent phase. I thought it might be the first spacecraft to do so, but a couple of readers wrote in to tell me that they remembered crescent views of Mars from Viking 2. A Google search quickly yielded an image on Astronomy Picture of the Day from 1999, showing a tiny, garishly colored view of a crescent Mars.
Raw Viking images contain a lot of speckly noise, random missing lines, and reseau markings, black dots painted onto the camera optics to help the imaging team remove distortion from the images. Thankfully, there is a piece of software that you can download from Peter Masek's website that copes with the first two of these problems. (His site also contains a lot of background information on how the Viking cameras worked.) I used his software to despeckle and convert the original files to a format that Photoshop could read. Then I took the images into Photoshop, combined red, green, and violet filter images into a color composite, and used the Photoshop clone stamp tool to remove the reseau markings by painting over them with bits of color from elsewhere in the image. Voila, a spectacular set of Viking 2 images of Mars' looming crescent.
Aug. 26, 2008 | 16:51 PDT | 23:51 UTC GLAST has a new name: FermiThe erstwhile Gamma-Ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) has today received a new name: Fermi. More officially, it is the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, one of the flagship orbiting observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope. Fermi studies the sky at very high energies, an area of science that I don't know much about. It is therefore quite fortunate that I can point you to Phil Plait for a more knowledgeable explanation than I can provide! He also has one of the Fermi images that were unveiled at a press conference today, a view of the entire sky at gamma-ray wavelengths. Aug. 26, 2008 | 09:06 PDT | 16:06 UTC Asteroids and comets to scale, as a single image for printing or PowerpointAfter posting the montage of asteroids and comets to scale last week I got a lot of requests for a single-image version of the montage. Your wish is my command! Here is a single image of all of the asteroids and comets that have been visited by spacecraft, sized to be dropped in to a Powerpoint presentation, or even used as a desktop image, at 1600 by 1200 pixels. In the caption I've provided links to a much larger version of the image, a whopping 6000 by 4500 pixels -- that's handily large enough to print as a 16 by 20 inch (40 by 50 cm) poster or even larger. Of course, I'm just going to have to update this in two weeks once Rosetta has returned photos of Steins! Steins, by the way, is supposed to be about 5 kilometers in diameter, roughly the size of Annefrank or Wild 2, so I shouldn't have any trouble fitting it in. But once Rosetta visits Lutetia in July 2010, I'll have to redo the layout -- Lutetia is expected to be about double the diameter of Mathilde. Thanks very much to Joel Parker for correcting some of my numbers on the body diameters.
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