More Mars Goodness…
A coworker of mine, John, and I have been working on a cool little script in our off time.
We really love looking at the 3D images put out by NASA of Mars taken by their Mars Exploratory Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The problem is that NASA only releases about one decent 3D image every few days. Not nearly enough for our tastes. I was grabbing the raw left and right images taken by cams and then using a tool to make them into anaglyphs(those pictures you use the blue and red glasses to see in 3D). This is a long process as you need to find two images taken of the same thing at the same time, one by each of the left and right lens of a given camera. Not a hard process, just labor intensive.
John and I thought there had to be a way to do this automagically. I started to think about how I would go about doing it after work last week. While I was doing a bit of research on the subject and trying to decide wether to do it in perl or something else I got an email from John saying he had finished the rough image download code. I looked at it and it seemed to work a charm. It goes to the MER page and will get all the matching left/right images for any given day. I played with it a bit and got it integrated into anaglyph software and we were almost there. I hacked on it some more so it would log images it had already downloaded and not attempt to re-download them to save bandwidth. I threw an automatic thumbnail generating script in the mix to generate and catalog the images by Sols so we could find any image we were looking for easily.
There are still a few bugs with the code that we are trying to work through but the basic functionality is there. The biggest one we have is that left and right images are not always taken at exactly the same time and we are matching on timestamps. We think we are close to solving this nagging problem and once we do our image catalog could triple or quadruple. Once we get it solved I’ll give details on how we got around it.
Well, I’ve talked enough about it. Break out your red-blue glasses and give it a try.
: Dirty Pool from the album “Texas Flood” by Stevie Ray Vaughan And Double Trouble