Last weekend I went to the SpaceUpLondon conference which was fantastic! However, I might have slightly forgotten to register for a 5 minute Ignite slot for the presentation I'd hastily put together the day before. So instead of letting it just sit unpresented on my hard-drive, I thought I'd record it and upload it here! 5 minutes, 20 auto-playing slides, and me talking about raw space data in a hopefully vaguely coherent way. In 1 take.
In the past few weeks I’ve been tinkering with the raw data captured by JUNO (a NASA space probe that is currently in orbit around Jupiter), to see if common Visual Effects tools would be effective in processing and aligning the imagery correctly.
I chose 2 specific raw images that were taken by Junocam (JUNO’s on-board camera) as the probe’s highly elliptical orbit brought it close to Jupiter for the first time — an event known as Perijove 1. The images captured Jupiter’s north and south poles, and, after several hours of manipulation, basic maths and a small amount of python scripting, I ended up with the two images posted below.
After posting my image of Jupiter’s south pole, I thought that I should probably attempt to recreate the north pole using the same techniques. This image was definitely trickier however due to a much higher level of compression (and resultant lack of definition) in the raw data. I’ve since been informed over on Unmanned Spaceflight that one of the aim’s during PJ1 was to test out differing levels of compression in order to ensure that future flybys can send as much, high-quality data as possible.
After a new set of raw images were released from JUNO’s first perijove, I decided to spend a few hours seeing if I could process, align, and stitch them using some relatively simple VFX techniques. Several hours later, I ended up with the image below.
