Panoramic Picture Taken By China's Moon Lander

Taco Cowboy writes "Perhaps it's not much, but China has released a panoramic view of the moonscape where their lander has landed. They 'stitched' up some 60 photos taken by 3 cameras on the Chang'e 3 lander, taken from 3 different angles — Vertical, 15 degrees up, and 15 degrees down. From the picture, there is a significant sized crater is seen, several meters wide, off to the left of Yutu, the (jade rabbit) moon rover, and located only about 10 meters away from the Chang'e-3 lander."

Spacecraft just went to sleep

[mbone]

CCTV just announced [youtube.com] that the Sun has set at Mare Imbrium and the Chang'E lander and the Yutu rover both have gone to sleep for the night.

NOT a Chinese released panorama

[mbone]

The image linked to is apparently from the Universe Today [universetoday.com]. As the linked article says :

To make it easier to see and sense ‘the new view from the Moon’, we have created screen shots from the rather low resolution TV broadcast and assembled them into a photo mosaic of the landing site - see above and below mosaic by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer.

That's why it's fuzzy. It's screen scraped from a TV.

Hugin

[ka9dgx]

They should have used Hugin [sourceforge.net], an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.

They need to visit the Vignetting [panotools.org] page to learn how to fix things.

Re:It's 2013

[cusco]

Those are mostly operating below the Van Allen belts, aren't they? There's no such protection on the moon.

Re:NOT a Chinese released panorama

[lolococo]

Well, in fact one of the commenters in this article linked to a set of much nicer pictures [xinhuanet.com]