NASA Scales Up 1966's Moon Image to Amazing Ultra-High Resolution

[krispos42]

This is pretty neat...

NASA Scales Up 1966's Moon Image to Amazing Ultra-High Resolution
By Jesus Diaz, 9:19 PM on Sun Nov 16 2008

When NASA released this image from their Lunar Orbiter 1 back in 1966, the first photograph ever of the Earth rising above the Moon's surface, it was low resolution but they still amazed the world. This week, they have surprised every space aficionado re-releasing the same image in ultra-high definition. The cool part now is that NASA hasn't used any upscaling or magical infinite zoom-in filter from CSI. Instead, they have created a new technology that uses refurbished analog machines and a new digital process that fully extracts the information stored in the program's old magnetic tapes, something that was impossible to do in the 60s.

The Lunar Orbiter missions included five spacecrafts dedicated to map the entire lunar surface, a task necessary to select the landing sites for Apollo. The first three missions focused on twenty potential landing sites, while the two last ones—which flew high altitude polar orbits—took photographs of 99% of the surface with a resolution that ranged from 60 meters to an stunning 2 meter.

While these probes were not as sophisticated as the HD cameras of the Selene spacecraft developed by the Japanese space agency, the NASA orbiters had a clever imaging system that achieved similar results four decades ago. It included a dual lens camera—one 610 millimeter narrow angle for high resolution and an 80 millimeter wide angle for medium resolution—, a film processor, and a scanner. Both lenses were aligned to expose the same part of the 70 millimeter film roll, so the high resolution image area was centered with the medium resolution area.

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http://gizmodo.com/5089936/nasa-scales-up-1966s-moon-image-to-amazing-ultra+high-resolution

The pic is amazing. 3,673 tall x 1,740 wide. I think I see Nova Scotia underneath the clouds there.

[Recursion]

1. Nah, it's a photoshopped fake, done on a 3/4 scale studio in Fall's Church NT

[soothsayer]

2. They don't help themselves by 'losing' the high res original landing footage

[DavidDvorkin]

3. That's a joke, right?

You're not actually implying that the moon landings were faked?

[pokerfan]

4. My favorite lunar image

is the mosaic of the lunar south pole taken by the Celmentine probe in 1994.

Mosaic of 1500 Clementine images of the south polar region of the Moon. These images were taken through the red filter of the UV/visible camera. This image shows the south pole at the center and extends to 70 deg. S latitude at the edge, a distance of about 1250 km across the image. This region is dominated by a major depression centered near the south pole, resulting in shadowed areas. The 320 km diameter crater Schrodinger is near the edge of the image at 4:30. (Clementine, USGS slide 17)

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/clm_usgs_17.html (3000px × 3000px)