Mun Survey

[hubbazoot]

So I\'ve decided to take on a rather ambitious project... I\'m going to screenshot every square meter of the Mun. I just got the orbiter set up at 8km altitude (highest terrain I\'ve seen so far has been 6km, so I figure that this is 'safe.'

I aligned the pod to always be oriented 'north,' so there\'s some hinting as to what latitude the object of interest is at. I\'m running completely stock, so longitude will be a little more tricky to figure out.

I flew right along the edge of the sunlight, so some of the shots will be a little dark, but I\'ll try to make sure they\'re good.

Edit: I just changed the orbit so now I\'m flying in good daylight. I\'ll be able to get sunlit shots of every bit of Kerbin.

I\'ll be skimming through the collection Friday night and posting the ones that are interesting. I\'d like to hear from you guys what sort of things would interest you (Peaks, Valleys, Poles, and 'Easter Eggs' will be posted, of course.)

I\'ll be taking the shots at once every 10 seconds, or once every 5.6km along my orbital route. I\'ll be skimming through them tomorrow night and posting them as I see interesting ones.

[hubbazoot]

Tweaked my orbit a bit so I could get all daytime shots.

[togfox]

It is acknowledged that the highest mountain on Mun is about 3000m. You don\'t need to fly that low but you don\'t need to be 8000m if you don\'t want to.

I suggest you use MechJeb mod. It provides long/lat co-ordinates.

Also search this forum for 'topography' and ISA_RAM.

Good luck.

[hubbazoot]

It is acknowledged that the highest mountain on Mun is about 3000m. You don\'t need to fly that low but you don\'t need to be 8000m if you don\'t want to.

I suggest you use MechJeb mod. It provides long/lat co-ordinates.

Also search this forum for 'topography' and ISA_RAM.

Good luck.

Thanks for the plugin info, some of those are certainly interesting, but I\'ve been trying to do all this vanilla as some of the plugins feel too much like 'cheating.' The coordinates would be handy, though.

Just an update on how it\'s going: I set up the polar orbit and have been going around for about two hours. I just watched as I passed by one of my past missions to the Mun, and I\'m getting a LOVELY band spread, just enough that every bit of terrain ends up going underneath the rover. I\'m not so sure about the max mountain height, though. There\'s something at ~50th south parallel that looks awfully ominous. The mountain in question is directly south of the leading edge of the Mun, if anyone wants to go do an in depth survey.

From what little I\'ve been watching, I haven\'t seen anything too alarming. There\'s some very flat terrain for a lander followed by another rather large shield-hill at about the 20th south parallel.

I\'m planning on doing a survey of Kerbin after this and seeing what info I can gather from a survey of that. We\'ll have to see how long this data takes to review, though. If I find anything remarkable, I\'ll note the latittude it\'s at and post a picture.

So far, the most rugged terrain appears to be at the north pole, which is the most rugged terrain I\'ve seen anywhere.

Right as I finished this, I passed my marker again. My spacing is PERFECT.

If anyone wants photos of an area, let me know.

[Corax]

If anyone wants photos of an area, let me know.

It might be an idea to put as many images as possible online somewhere, as an archive or as individual images, or both.

I have no idea about the amount of data we\'re talking about, but just as an example, Dropbox offers 2 GB of free online storage. (Shameless plug: sign up by following this link and both of us get another 500MB as a bonus)

Somebody is bound to make use of it. I mean, a high-resolution map of the Mun, who could possibly resist the temptation?!

[hubbazoot]

I just finished the survey, and my estimate was pretty close. It looks like the final image set size will be 1.5~1.7gb. Unfortunately, I already have a dropbox and that dropbox has tons of goodies in it. I\'m gonna start sorting by latitudes and get rid of the ones on the dark side here tonight.

[Romfarer]

Are you making an interactive map? GoogleMun?

[hubbazoot]

These are moreso isometric shots, and I lack the technological knowhow to do anything much fancier than put them in folders by latitude

[SubOrbitalGuy]

If you are using windows you could try to stitch them together, using the the free tool \'Image Composite Editor\' (ICE) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/ .

If it works, it will produce one very large file, which could be further manipulated/used as input for other programs.

There is the possibility to use the ICE-feature called deep zoom, unfortunately it\'s based on MS Silverlight, but it\'s worth a try if no one knows something more practical, I guess.

[hubbazoot]

Mun survey finished. After I pruned out all the guaranteed dark side shots (It was cool, they were all less than 900k, which I found interesting. Easy sorting though.) I\'m now left with 1722 pictures of the Mun.

Each of these shots is 1600x900, and is ~1mb. I have about 2gb of data at the moment I\'m figuring out what to do with, and it\'s a little overwhelming. I\'m thinking I\'ll put them in a per-sweep folder format, as this will make matching up common sets much easier. If anyone has a suggestion of what to do with such gratuitous amounts of data, I\'d like to hear it.

Here\'s a sample of one of the polar shots I took. These are about the darkest of the batch. The first spoiler is my thoughts on the first shot, the second two are pictures.

I think that\'s the pit where the Munolith is, in the top right corner of the shot.