Space Imaging II: Getting Started with MER and Cassini Raw Images now available for download

Posted By Emily Lakdawalla

2009/11/19 02:49 CST

Topics: Planetary Society Video, amateur image processing, explaining image processing, podcasts and videos, Mars Exploration Rovers, Cassini

I probably crammed too much into today's class: an hour-and-a-half whirlwind tour through the cameras on the rovers and Cassini, how to access their raw images on the Internet, and some basic processing that you can do with each of them.

If you would like to see the recording of the class, go to the Space Imaging section of our website, to the Tutorials page, and follow the links to the WebEx recording, either streamed or downloaded. Before you do so, you will want to have either GIMP or Photoshop installed on your computer. For this class I did all the demonstrations in GIMP, but the operations are pretty similar in Photoshop.

It's interesting to compare the two software packages. I'm a Photoshop user myself, but I'm finding processing color images to be easier in GIMP than in Photoshop. Animations are easier to compose in Photoshop than in GIMP, however. And Photoshop includes a way-cool Photomerge automatic mosaic-stitching package that's not available in GIMP. But I may switch to GIMP to do my own color image processing work from here on out!

The next class will not be until some time after the Thanksgiving holiday. I'll start digging into the nitty gritty details of how space cameras work, and follow that with a class introducing the Planetary Data System.