Not your typical photography

Fenster

One of the areas of photography I consider to be absolutely "hardcore" is space probes - before you say it, try remotely controllnig a camera that is 6 AU away, travelling at 15km/s and in areas both of high radiation and extreme temperatures.

And then successfully coordinating the camera so you can capure panoramas like this (56k).

Over what was otherwise a bad weekend (one of my cats was killed) I emailed the imaging teams for the Cassini, New Horizons and Venus Express probes. So far I've had a reply from the CICLOPS team in regards to my question about their image processing:

Hi Mark- Thanks for your interest.

As you probably know, Cassini stores the imaging data on its solid state
recorder. The spacecraft points its high gain antenna toward Earth and
transmits the data from all of its instruments, as well as information
about the operational status of the spacecraft. These telemetry signals
make their way across 1.6 billion kilometers of space and are received
by the giant dish antennas of the Deep Space Network. These packets of
telemetry are piped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California, where they are “unpacked.” Raw ISS image files are assembled
from the data stream and are forwarded to CICLOPS, where they are
ingested into our ever growing image database.

Once the images arrive at CICLOPS we “navigate” them--we use proprietary
software that employs spacecraft position information to provide us with
very detailed information about each image. This tells us things like
image scale, what latitude we’re seeing on the target body, and
Cassini’s elevation above or below the rings. The navigated images in
our database can then be used for scientific analysis or prepared for
public release. In addition, one of CICLOPS’ main duties is archiving
this data, so every couple of months we ship a large chunk of images and
our database info to NASA for archiving in their Planetary Data System.
At this point, these data are available to the whole world for research
and enjoyment.

We use some home-grown software to calibrate and process the raw image
files. Some off-the-shelf tools, like Photoshop, are occasionally
employed as well. Some of the things we do include rotating, sharpening,
brightening, and cleaning cosmic ray hits from the images. Cassini’s CCD
detectors are constantly bombarded by high energy particles called
cosmic rays (Earth’s magnetic field protects us from most of them).
These “hits” look kind of like interference in a TV picture, and we use
software to help get rid of them (although some pesky ones have to be
spotted and removed manually).

In processing images for public release, there are a couple of different
paths a product can take. If an image is selected as a daily release
(see these every weekday morning at ciclops.org!), it usually gets
simple enhancements to make details crisp and easy to see. Sometimes
small moons in the images are brightened, and we mention when this is
done in the image captions. We try to keep the dailies interesting and
provide a variety of views of the many sights to see around Saturn.

Then there are the more unique color image products and mosaics. These
require a great deal of time, attention, and effort from our staff here.
For instance, Cassini takes a succession of red, green, and blue images
to make a single color view, but since the spacecraft is in constant
motion, we often have to align moons (which are also moving), rings, and
the planet to produce the final image. It’s not trivial. And for large
mosaic images (like this view: http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=3192), the
process has to be repeated many times, and then the individual tiles
must be properly resized and aligned to fit together seamlessly.

I hope this gives you a good overall feel for what’s involved in
producing these incredible views. It’s a lot of work, but we are very
proud of what we do, and we feel extremely privileged to be doing it!
And there’s a lot more to come.

Regards,
Preston Dyches
CICLOPS

countryjimbo

That's very interesting, sounds like a great job. Surprised with the amount of detail they sent you. Well done on emailing them to ask!

Rojo

That looks like a CGI.. it's too perfect! Lots of chromatic abberation going on the right-hand side of Saturn!