Update: Compare our image (left) with the best quality USGS image (right) – Click on image to enlarge. Here’s the full resolution TIFF image (caution: over 600MB). By the way the odd craters in the middle are Messier A and B.
Dennis Wingo: I love looking at the Moon. It is one of my little joys in doing the LOIRP project that I get to look at amazing images of the Moon that we get that look so incredible. Just by chance yesterday I was looking through some processed framelets because I had a discrepancy between what I was recording in my log book of the Lunar Orbiter sequence numbers and the framelets on the tapes as recorded by NASA. I happened upon image LOV-041M from tapes W5-154, 155.
I started looking at the framelets and found the super cool oblique shots interesting when looking at them on the 30″ Apple high res monitor. We just had to get that image and so we found that we were missing a few framelets due to a tape change and thus we got the rest off of a Goldstone tape (G5-145).
Last night Austin ran the framelets through our assembly and image processing program and left me the frame. I loaded it on my computer this morning and was just simply blown away by it when zooming in. It seriously looks like you are on a spacecraft about 50 km above the surface looking down. The first image here is a zoom into the upper right quadrant of that image. The second image is from the Arizona State Quickmap looking straight down into the same area.
One thing that is just so fascinating to me is how much more I get out of the oblique images when trying to get a sense of an area. You can actually see how high a mountain is that just looks like a bump when looking down on it from a vertical perspective. This is making me revise my estimation of the value of many of the LO images because it is extremely difficult for the LROC camera, if not impossible, to get images like this.
Today the full res frame will go up on the NLSI web server and we will provide the link to the 691 megabyte image. Hope you have a good network connection! I will post the link to the high res image when Teague gets it on the server! Update: Here’s the full resolution image (over 600MB)
Click on images to enlarge