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."

Comments

Spacecraft just went to sleep

[mbone]

CCTV just announced 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. 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.

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

Hugin

[ka9dgx]

They should have used Hugin, 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 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.