Voyager 3: Amateur timelapse of Jupiter 're-enacts' Voyager 1 1970 flyby

This animated gif shows Voyager 1′s approach to Jupiter during a period of over 60 Jupiter days in 1979. 

Credit: NASA

Back in the 1970′s when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, we were all mesmerised by a movie created from Voyager 1 images of the movement of the clouds in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Voyager 1 began taking pictures of Jupiter as it approached the planet in January 1979 and completed its Jupiter encounter in early April.

During that time it took almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements to create the short movie, which you can see below, showing the intricate movement of the bright band of clouds for the first time.

Now, 35 years later a group of seven Swedish amateur astronomers achieved their goal of replicating the Voyager 1 footage, not with another flyby but with images taken with their own ground-based telescopes.

"We started this joint project back in December of 2013 to redo the NASA Voyager 1 flyby of Jupiter," amateur astronomer Göran Strand told reporters.

"During 90 days we captured 560 still images of Jupiter and turned them into 90 complete maps that covered the whole of Jupiter's surface."


Their newly released film, above details the work they did and the hurdles they overcame (including incredibly bad weather in Sweden this winter) to make their dream a reality.

They called their project "Voyager 3."

It is really an astonishing project and those of you who do image processing will appreciate the info in the video about the tools they used and how they did their processing to create this video.

The Swedish team of amateur astronomers who compiled the ‘Voyager 3′ project. 

Credit: Göran Strand

NASA Juno Flyby: Amateur ham radio operators send Morse messages to spacecraft

See how amateur ham radio operators beamed messages to NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft during its Earth flyby of Oct. 9, 2013. Did their morse code messages of hello reach Juno?

Credit: Nasa /JPL Caltech

Electronic Chip Cleans Up Common Flaws in Amateur Photographs

This image shows a setup of a demonstration system that integrates the processor with DDR2 memory and connects with a camera and a display through the USB interface. 

The system provides a platform for live computational photography. 

(Credit: MIT, Nathan Ickes, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Your smartphone snapshots could be instantly converted into professional-looking photographs with just the touch of a button, thanks to a processor chip developed at MIT.

The chip, built by a team at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory, can perform tasks such as creating more realistic or enhanced lighting in a shot without destroying the scene's ambience, in just a fraction of a second. The technology could be integrated with any smartphone, tablet computer or digital camera.

Existing computational photography systems tend to be software applications that are installed onto cameras and smartphones.

However, such systems consume substantial power, take a considerable amount of time to run, and require a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the user, says the paper's lead author, Rahul Rithe, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

"We wanted to build a single chip that could perform multiple operations, consume significantly less power compared to doing the same job in software, and do it all in real time," Rithe says.

One such task, known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, is designed to compensate for limitations on the range of brightness that can be recorded by existing digital cameras, to capture pictures that more accurately reflect the way we perceive the same scenes with our own eyes.

To do this, the chip's processor automatically takes three separate "low dynamic range" images with the camera: a normally exposed image, an overexposed image capturing details in the dark areas of the scene, and an underexposed image capturing details in the bright areas.

It then merges them to create one image capturing the entire range of brightness in the scene, Rithe says.

Software-based systems typically take several seconds to perform this operation, while the chip can do it in a few hundred milliseconds on a 10-megapixel image.

This means it is even fast enough to apply to video, Ickes says. The chip consumes dramatically less power than existing CPUs and GPUs while performing the operation, he adds.

Another task the chip can carry out is to enhance the lighting in a darkened scene more realistically than conventional flash photography.

"Typically when taking pictures in a low-light situation, if we don't use flash on the camera we get images that are pretty dark and noisy, and if we do use the flash we get bright images but with harsh lighting, and the ambience created by the natural lighting in the room is lost," Rithe says.

So in this instance the processor takes two images, one with a flash and one without. It then splits both into a base layer, containing just the large-scale features within the shot, and a detailed layer.

Finally, it merges the two images, preserving the natural ambience from the base layer of the nonflash shot, while extracting the details from the picture taken with the flash.

To remove unwanted features from the image, such as noise -- the unexpected variations in color or brightness created by digital cameras -- the system blurs any undesired pixel with its surrounding neighbors, so that it matches those around it.

In conventional filtering, however, this means even those pixels at the edges of objects are also blurred, which results in a less detailed image.

But by using what is called a bilateral filter, the researchers are able to preserve these outlines, Rithe says. That is because bilateral filters will only blur pixels with their neighbors if they have been assigned a similar brightness value.

Since any objects within the image are likely to have a very different level of brightness than that of their background, this prevents the system from blurring across any edges, he says.

To perform each of these tasks, the chip's processing unit uses a method of organizing and storing data called a bilateral grid. The image is first divided into smaller blocks.

For each block, a histogram is then created. This results in a 3-D representation of the image, with the x and y axes representing the position of the block, and the brightness histogram representing the third dimension.

'Pink' Full Moon As Seen From Space

If you thought this week's full moon, also known as the "Pink Moon," looked spectacular from Earth, then take a look at this photo of Earth's well-lit neighbour as seen by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).

Japanese astronaut, and prolific amateur photographer Soichi Noguchi posted this stunning moon photo from the space station on Thursday, a day after the full moon, making it his 14th "moon shot" photo since he launched to the orbiting lab in December. [More moon photos.]