Calling all Moon Watchers - Need help with Pics

I know this is long but please read the whole post as I have several issues.

I started off trying to study the Moon with Google Earth's Google Moon application and found the pics not very good. I came across the Moon Rising film by Jose Escamilla. He has a bunch of parts of it posted on YouTube.

I am looking for all the best high resolution color pictures I can find. (If you work for NASA and feel like giving me Ultra High Resolution Moon Pictures not offered to the public, because you want to help blow the cover on the government conspiracy just U2U me and I will use the pictures without telling where I got them.) ( hey.. people who are laughing.. It Could Happen!)

I also want to be able to study them as Jose Escamilla did in the film. In this section of video, Jose says you can take this flat skin of the Moon and use a graphics program to wrap it into a sphere. I want to do that.

www.youtube.com...

Does anyone know how to do that and what program I can use?

The flat skin picture he is talking about is here:
www.mapaplanet.org... defaultcenter=on&grid=none&stretch=auto&projection=SIMP&advoption=NO&info=NO&resolution=2

But I don't know how to download this picture from this viewer.. Is this a scaled down picture of the original. Should I look to download this from someplace else? If so, where?

(I didn't post the video because I don't know if that would be o.k. with Jose or not, so I just posted the link)

Jose also says in the video, he downloaded hundreds of close up pictures of the Moon off the USGS website, but he does not say where he got these pictures exactly. He does say you can view the pictures, I quote Jose:

" To clear up some debunkers claims: First of all the USGS presents "grayscale - Natural Color - False Color and enhanced Color representations of the Clementine photos. Each is different from the other.

There is a big difference between Natural Color and False Color

Pay attention to the film! At first I demonstrated how I wanted a full color "poster for the film," so I colorized 247 B&W Apollo pix.

THEN I found the USGS "Natural Color" of the moon photos here:

www.mapaplanet.org...

CLICK on the "Natural Color" link. What the USGS has done is made a "black" square hiding the graphic's content.

On the left you will see two magnifying glass ZOOM icons. Click on the (+) ZOOM icon. You will see the content is no longer black.
CLICK anywhere, THEN on the left click on the "Yellow" box with checkered features.

Keep ZOOMING in to any areas and you can see the full color for yourself. There will be areas "blacked out" and some areas "blurred" but for the most part you are seeing the moon in "Full Color."

Starting at 4:07 on Part 6 until the the end of the film I present the "Natural Color" photography of the moon taken during the Clementine Mission.

Don't let debunkers or no brainers posting here that the moon is B&W detract you from the truth. Jose Escamilla "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, I did find some pictures like the ones listed by Jose above for download, not just to view. These are UVVIS - Ultra Violet Visible, just like the pictures Jose talks about above taken from the Clementine mission in 1994. These are very large files for moon pictures! They range from 21 MB's to 1.9 Gigabytes! There are 4 of the really large gigabyte size files each with a different section of the Moon. Combined that is 4.8 Gigabytes of Color moon Pictures!

ser.sese.asu.edu...

However, Houston, We Have a Problem! These pictures are in a .cub file extension after unzipping them. I have no idea how to actually View them! Do I need a special viewer? I cannot seem to find one that will work with the .cub extension. ( I use windows XP)

I want to know, are these the best pictures that are available or did Jose use other pictures for his film?

Lastly, I wish to know is there any way to get this data into Google Moon to replace the default moon. I want to be able to explore this just like Google Moon with showing the coordinates and all the extras.

Thanks Folks!





[edit on 22-11-2009 by JohnPhoenix]

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Hi John

This Link may be of service to you, although im not sure, none the less its an awesome site

Thelivingmoon.com

I wish you good luck in your mission and I hope you have some great outcomes as your curiosity is totally valid and a second opinion on the images can always help.

The NASA stuff you should be able to get online also Ill have a look and see for specific links a little later on.

Have the best day
themuse

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Hi John
awesome
you can use photoshop to do Joe's color technique - that would be sweet to see on these LO pics!

To get quick grabs of these pics I downloaded all 6 gig (took a while) then unzipped them with winrar and used the snipping tool in windows (vista) Start>Programs>Accessories>Snipping Tool

Good luck and keep us all posted !

ps. you can click on my links in my signature to see my own efforts (some great places to start anyway)

Originally posted by watchZEITGEISTnow
reply to post by JohnPhoenix

 

Hi John
awesome

you can use photoshop to do Joe's color technique - that would be sweet to see on these LO pics!

To get quick grabs of these pics I downloaded all 6 gig (took a while) then unzipped them with winrar and used the snipping tool in windows (vista) Start>Programs>Accessories>Snipping Tool

You shouldn't need to do colorizing to these pictures.. as they are already in natural color.. I thought.

Does the Snipping tool in Vista open .cub files? If so, is there one for win xp?

[edit on 22-11-2009 by JohnPhoenix]

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Hi there John like someone else said thelivingmoon is your best bet for decent moon images as Zorgon has pointed out many times that if you look at the clememtine images compared to one of his guys with a 12 inch telescope worth a few thousand bucks

Having said that I am not trying to be discouraging whatsoever just incase it may have sounded that way

Earlier this year I was looking into ISIS from USGS which can be found here:

isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov...

ISIS is software which enables you to view large datasets of images which include the clementine set as far as I know. Sadly they do not make it easy as you will need to run a Linux OS along with many other hurdles which would put off anyone other than the dedicated to view the images.

Anyway John good luck with finding more and maybe this thread will yield some more info which would be very cool

Do look over thelivingmoon for Mike Deegans Moon Mosaic.. its awesome!

Also look around for other Am astroimagers as they have some great images of the Moon but be careful with getting in contact with them as i posted a great image by one guy and someone on the message board i posted it on went and emailed the guy and said they saw all sorts of things which I did not even agree with and the guy who took the images was a little put back to put it midly. As I said to her let these guys take images and search around for them as many still believe the Moon is a dead place that is grey scale. If you want to see that image u2u me and I will give you the link if you promise not to spook out this guy

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


I think any 3D program can use that image as a "skin" to cover a sphere.

As Somamech said, you need ISIS to open those .cub files. It happens that I have ISIS, so I am downloading one of those images now to see if I can transform it to a PNG (by using some of the programs that are part of ISIS, ISIS is not a program, it's more of a toolbox to work with NASA or NASA formatted images).

As I have ISIS installed in a virtual machine I don't know if I will be able to open images as large as that one, but I can tell you that the original images have a resolution of 100 metres per pixel (5 times higher that that 1.2 GB image) and are available here in IMG (another NASA format) format. You can see those IMG files with NASAView, a free program available here.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Theres a program "Adobe Photoshop" Price:100+ that has a plug in that can "wrap in image in a sphere.
adobe.com

The Gimp can also do that price:free
gimp.org

also Blender a 3D program can Skin stuff to sphere price : free
blender.org

the last 2 are also for windows not just linux and they have a great help community



[edit on 11/22/2009 by EvilBat]

reply to post by ArMaP


Now that's a really good answer to some of my questions.. Thanks!

yep.. I want it All.. as much is available :-)

reply to post by JohnPhoenix

I have already downloaded one (the Western Hemisphere) and I am converting the image to PNG.

As each .CUB file, in this case, has five different channels, I have to convert it five times, one for each channel. Each PNG is around 130MB, and you will need three, for red, green and blue.

reply to post by Somamech



Ahh Thanks for telling me about the nasa program.

( in case your wondering why this post looks backward, I had the page opened already and scrolled up so I say the Mods post first... I just didn't look at this for the last couple of house because I didn't think anyone saw it to post here)

Hmm well I have Linux, and I think I know where I can get a copy of that 'toolbox' too. I am sure it won't be easy but I believe I owe it to myself to see what NASA is hiding from the public if anything.

If I cant get a copy of the program, I wont expect you guys to convert it for me.. I can see how converting images that large would be a huge task and require tons of resources.

reply to post by ArMaP


Please don't go to any trouble on my account. I know you offered, but you need to enjoy your Sunday afternoon as much as the next guy.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


For me it's already Sunday night, I'm in Portugal, and it's no trouble, ISIS does all the work.

What Linux distro do you have? I have ISIS installed in Ubuntu 8.04, and it wasn't difficult for someone that had only used Unix and Red Hat some years ago.

I have Ubuntu 8 also. It's on another drive.. I use it when I am not using windows for games.

I'd have gotten back to you sooner but My Football team won and we celebrated, then I had to nap.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Then you can start here.

Any problem just ask, it can be something that happened to me too.
Good luck.

reply to post by ArMaP


Once I get this win7 box sorted I may just take up your offer for help there

Did any of you guys see that new juicy image from moonviews being transcoded for our viewing pleasure ? Both large .tif images I have from those guys have been A1

In saying all the above it reminds me that to get good pics of the Moon I need my own scope and I don't have the sort of funds that would purchase me what I need

Just to let yo guys know.. Saturday, I emailed the map a planet people at the USGS and asked them how I could download the entire full image found here:

www.mapaplanet.org... defaultcenter=on&grid=none&stretch=auto&projection=SIMP&advoption=NO&info=NO&resolution=2

I got an email back saying that image would be over 60 (wow) gigabytes, and their download system can only handle 2 gig chunks of data per download.

I would dedicate an entire hard drive to this if I could get it. The idea is to put this on a sphere and figure out how to get the coordinates right so I can make a better viewer than Google Moon. I think that is something the public would want. the data is there.. it's just a matter of getting it and figuring out how to make it work.

[edit on 23-11-2009 by JohnPhoenix]

reply to post by ArMaP


Awesome.. thanks.. getting it.

Hey.. serious question for Moon lovers. ( of course this shows I am a dummy LOL) I notice looking at lots of moon pics lately, that there are tons of large craters with hills,bumps right in the center of the craters. Are these the left overs of the meteors that made the craters? I would assume so.. but if so, wouldn't they be the stuff NASA should really study? If Nasa says these are not parts of the meteors, then what happened to the meteros?
( of course I am sure these are huge.. more like mountains)

I found Mike's Mosaic It is awesome.. found here:
thelivingmoon.com...

Somamech, I wish I had the funds for a telescope too. a nice 40 inch I think.. and the space for it! (kidding of course)

But what I don't get is why no one has built an array of scopes with built in video cameras and software for user control over the net. That would be sweet.



[edit on 23-11-2009 by JohnPhoenix]

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


I would like to warn you that after downloading all data files for ISIS (and ISIS itself, obviously), my ISIS folder occupies 55.5 GB, so you will need at least that free space.

PS: although this is turning more into a ISIS thread I still think it's in the right place.

Thanks for the heads up.. it's going to take me a while to DL all the data.. I don't have but a mid line DSL connection . Heck, I may run out an buy a new hard drive or two.

I think this is funny.. largest telescope on Earth and not one Moon pic.. now if that don't seem like a conspiracy I don't know what does.

www.gtc.iac.es...

Of course like the Hubble, we may get the excuse that it's too powerful to resolve a high resolution for an object so close... something about that argument just don't sit right with me.

Originally posted by JohnPhoenix
I think this is funny.. largest telescope on Earth and not one Moon pic.. now if that don't seem like a conspiracy I don't know what does.

Proposals for moon pictures would probably get turned down since telescope time is expensive and finite; we already have lunar probes giving us far better images than this telescope could ever hope to provide, so there's nothing to be gained from using this telescope on the moon. Plus the adaptive optics in the segmented mirror is not designed to be used while looking at the moon; you need a star, real or artificial, for it to analyze the atmospheric disturbances and compensate for them by moving each mirror segment. Seeing (atmospheric distortion) would kill this telescope's resolution. Lucky imaging would be the only alternative, but I don't know how much of the true maximum theoretical resolution you can really get back from a mirror this size. With a little .2 meter amateur telescope like mine lucky imaging is capable of recovering almost all the theoretical resolution because the mirror is small enough that the distortions in the atmosphere above the mirror are basically equal in magnitude across the diameter of the mirror. That may not be the case with a 10 meter mirror.

[edit on 24-11-2009 by ngchunter]