August 29, 2010
Another Broken Heart
image by John Moore, Ireland
Congratulations to John, who has figured out how to reconstruct the interleaved LRO Wide Angle Camera (WAC) files to create images. The LRO WAC image files are frustrating because they can not simply be looked since narrow image swaths are taken sequentially in 7 wavelengths, and then the adjacent piece of the image is acquired in 7 wavelengths, etc. This results in the WAC images looking like a venetian blind, with narrow swaths repeated 7 times before reaching the next geographic piece of the image. It should be an easy job to write software to re-assemble images, which the LRO team must have, but I am not aware of amateurs doing so before. John's experience differs from how I expected that image are unpacked and reassembled so more experimentation is in order. This wonderful image, which is uncalibrated, is a slightly lower illumination angle view than the extraordinary Apollo 15 Metric camera image. I expect that the two high resolution views can be used to create a very high resolution topographic map.
Chuck Wood
NOTE: I haven't checked recently the unmannedspaceraft.com forum - folks there are surely exploring WAC reconstructions.
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