Matt Wronkiewicz’s Weblog

The World Wide Panorama is an occasional online event that features photographic panoramas in QuickTime VR format. The theme this time is beginnings. For my entry, I photographed some of the earliest structures in Ventura, which are on the site of the San Buenaventura Mission. On my way there, I stopped at Lowe’s with a trunk full of power tools and fashioned myself a panoramic tripod head adapter. It’s just a stick with bolts sticking out of it so you can attach your camera to the tripod with an offset along the lens axis. In theory this should reduce the effects of parallax when you pan the camera around. It worked pretty well. Most of the level photos matched up better than they have in the past. When I pitched the camera up or down, however, the parallax returned. You can tell on this panorama that the further you move down, the worse the stitching gets. I scrapped it and built a new two axis tripod head that should work much better.

After two days at home, Joseph and I left for the company ski trip. We had a great time up at Mammoth. Most of the time it was very cloudy, in fact the top of the mountain was closed for most of the weekend because of low visibility. I went up to the top with the camera, but I couldn’t see much, so I took the gondola back down. On the way, I saw a break in the clouds that opened up the whole valley for a photo shoot. About halfway down the mountain I got off the gondola and hiked around to find a good place to set up. I ended up right above a cliff with a good view of the mountain and the valley. You can see the resulting panorama here. This one was challenging because of the precarious location and my frozen fingers. I had the white balance set wrong, and this created an interesting problem when I tried to fix it in software. Where I had blown out the exposure by pointing the camera at the sun, the affected areas ended up a bright color instead of white. I managed to clip most of it out, but you can still see a spot of yellow here and there. The stitched panorama turned out really well. There is a little bit of parallax error still. I think I’m going to have to build myself a panoramic tripod head to fix that.

Thanks to the generous offer by Mallory and Joan Green to let me stay with them in Washington DC, I was able to go to March Storm this year. March Storm is an event organized by ProSpace to bring together space enthusiasts for three days of lobbying congress. The specifics of what we talk about are different from year to year, but the overall goal is to encourage more private commercial activity in space, and to reorient the national space program toward solving real problems instead of exploring for the sake of exploration. I have gone to the annual event for five years now and have always been encouraged by the legislative results that follow. Not to mention the enthusiasm of some of the congressional staffers we talk to when they begin to understand what space exploration is really about.

Anyway, we had a very coherent agenda this year, and I think it worked really well. You can read it here.  We had three main points. One, NASA should continue and expand the COTS program for International Space Station logistics and crew access. So far, this program has encouraged private investment in commercial orbital rockets and spacecraft. This is a good thing, because private, for-profit investment is generally much more effective than government investment at improving efficiency and reducing costs. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has done a surprisingly good job of managing and protecting this program to date. The second topic was the threat of near Earth objects (NEOs) to the Earth. Mitigating this threat is one of the ways the national space effort could demonstrate effectiveness at solving real problems, since sooner or later we will find a rock that has it in for us. The only question is how big it is, where it will hit, and whether or not we find it while we can still do something about it. The third topic was space solar power. You may already know that I have a particular interest in this technology. Our presentation centered around the NSSO interim assessment (PDF) of space based solar power. One of the findings of this assessment was that space solar power is a technology that may be able to solve some serious and real energy problems that affect the Department of Defense, and therefore that it merits further study.

I had the pleasure of working with some very smart and dedicated people during my two days of Congressional briefings. On Monday I teamed up with Will Watson of the Space Frontier Foundation. On Tuesday my partner was Joe Gillin. Of course, the event would not have been possible without the extensive efforts of Frank Johnson. A great time was had by all. Below you’ll find a photo from the Sunday training session of Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart giving us a presentation over Skype, on my laptop!

Joseph and I built an Aerotech Arreaux. He painted it and I named it Martian Sunrise. We took it to Santa Fe Dam to fly it at the SCRA launch. I loaded an E15-7W engine, and the LCO gave a countdown and pressed the button. It fizzled. The igniter popped but didn’t start the engine, probably because I hadn’t attached it securely enough. We tried again and up it flew. And then it continued on a ballistic trajectory back to the Earth. The flight ended after 13 seconds with the nose cone embedded 6 inches into packed dirt. The airframe was shredded. We cleaned up the crash site and flew another rocket before we headed home. Joseph’s beautiful paint job is gone, but the rocket will fly again after I get some replacement body tubes and a new nose cone. See photos and a video at the photo album.

I’ve finished my first Google Gadget. It’s an up-to date map of the Earth using satellite imagery from the Aqua and Terra observation satellites. The satellite data gets downloaded from NASA GSFC and turned into tiles which work with the Google Maps API. No images older than 36 hours are used. There are other satellite maps available online which are more up to date or more complete, but not both.

Add it to your iGoogle homepage or use the interactive map page.I’ve been working on mapping satellite images off and on for about two years. I have a virtual globe program that downloads the images on the fly and lets you spin and zoom around, but it was never in a state that I could distribute it. The biggest problem was that it makes heavy use of NASA’s web server, and I didn’t think they could take the load if lots of people were using it at the same time. The gadget gets around that problem by hosting a reduced resolution map on my own server. If the load gets too much for my web host, I can make use of Google caching, but that has its own problems. There are some defects in the map stitching. MODIS Rapid Response serves the images as JPEGs, with stuff drawn on them. Also, absent data and heavy cloud cover look exactly the same in the images, so picking them apart is a difficult problem. That’s why there’s some occasional white noise or white regions in the map. Finally, NASA doesn’t publish the geolocated satellite images until about a day after the image is taken, so I had to do it myself using the orbital elements of the satellites. I don’t think the orbital elements are exact enough for this, and I think I have some errors in the algorithm. This means that some parts of the map are shifted slightly from the correct locations.

Still, I think the resulting map came out really good. It’s fun to watch as clouds swirl around, dust blows off the Sahara, snow covers New England, and fires consume my home state.

I posted a panorama of our Christmas Lights display here. This is my first panorama shot with the new Canon XTi that Darcy got me. With a field of view of about 65 degrees, I can shoot 360 x 90 degree panoramas with about 20 images. That would have taken 50 images on the camcorder. Also, shooting RAW images allowed me to do some tonemapping on this scene. This scene was particularly difficult because the reindeer on my lawn were so bright that everything else on the street was black in comparison. Using HDR tonemapping, I was able to increase the contrast on the scene without blowing out the reindeer. There is some noise speckling the darker parts of the panorama, which I could have reduced if I had increased the exposure time or shot bracketed exposures. This was actually my second attempt at the scene. The first time, I had the aperture set too wide and very little of the panorama was in focus. The second attempt, I set the aperture to F11 and increased the exposure time to 2.5 seconds.