Astroblog: More Mars Webcam images

Monday, August 25, 2008

More Mars Webcam images

I've had a bit of a further play with the Mars Express VMC images. The image to the left is a red-green-stereo anaglyph, you should click on the image to enlarge it, and put on those silly red/blue stereo glasses to see the 3D effect. The effect isn't ideal, and the craters don't seem to have as good a 3D effect as I would have hoped, but it is not completely rubbish. I first imported the images via ImageJ, converted them to BMP format, sharpened the images individaully using wavelet adjustment in Registax (a wavelet correction of 10 in the 5:1 layer, and 30 in the 6:1), then finally assembled the anaglyph in The GIMP (see this link for a tutorial)

I have also done an animation of Mars rotating. This isn't particularly good, as Mars went partly off camera during the imaging sequence, and I couldn't get a good run of images. Still, it does show what can be done.

I used the sharpened images from above, and manually aligned them using the "difference" layer function in the GIMP, then used the GIMP animation function on the aligned layers. Now if I could just get rid of those pesky artefacts.

UPDATE: Check out my images on the ESA VMC webcam site! While you are there, check out the images from Riding with Robots.

Labels: animation, Mars, webcam