Amateur takes on the Dawn Vesta images

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2011/06/24 10:12 CDT

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I am pretty sure that the Dawn team put nearly every image they've taken of Vesta so far in the animation they released yesterday, which is awesome. It hasn't taken long for the amateur image processing community to pick that animation apart into its component frames and process the heck out of the individual images to produce some very fine looking images and animations. They aren't any better for science -- in fact, all the processing makes them less useful for science -- so it takes nothing away from the science to have artists like Daniel Macháček and Ted Stryk work over the data. This is how I think the science and amateur communities can really help each other out -- when scientists share data with hungry amateurs, the amateurs give back by producing better-looking images and videos that the scientists can use to make their Powerpoint presentations prettier!

Of course, what will really make Vesta look prettier is Dawn getting closer to it. And that's happening with every passing moment. Anyway, as a reminder, here's the raw material for the following products, the animation released by the Dawn team yesterday:

Here is Marco Di Lorezo's take on the Vesta animation:

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Marco Di Lorenzo

Here is Ted Stryk's attempt to use the final four frames to make a more detailed image:

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Ted Stryk

Vesta on June 20, 2011

To make this image, Ted Stryk stacked four frames of the Vesta animation taken by Dawn on June 20, 2011. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Ted Stryk

And here is Daniel Machacek's tweened and smoothed version of the animation.