Celestia Forums

Greetings all,

yesterday, SlashDot had a link to this amazing little Danish website http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f29.html, which has lots of 360?° panoramas - including those that were taken at various Apollo landing sites.

If your browser supports these with the QuickTime VR plug-in and you can stand long download times, then you can enjoy 'almost' being there. I only had time to look at the Apollo 11 one, and I'm sure the others have a more intersting landscape, but these are quite amazing.

Spiff.

Don't forget that with some minimal image manipulation, you can display panoramas in Celestia. See http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... ramas.html

Well, the manipulation is not so minimal. I for myself never found out how to distort the images in the right way so that the edges become invisible to the viewer - as this is done in other peoples panoramas.

maxim

maxim,

I'm referring to the manipulation that needs to be done to panoramic images that someone already has created. They usually only need to be padded on the top and bottom and scaled to comply with Celestia's size requirements.

Creating panoramic images from scratch from is much more complicated than that, of course.

Ok, so the apollo 17 panorama would be easily to incoorporate? But how to strip the textures from a quicktime panorama?

--------------------------------

I indeed stumbled over this when you introduced it some time ago, and I was wondering why it wasn't used more commonly. When I tried to use it myself, I found, as I said, that I would have to do all panos by myself - including proper distortion. I thought about checking if terragen could make such work, but had no patience (and time) to dive into it.

maxim

Many of the Apollo panoramic images are available online as jpeg images, not just in VRML files.

Links to some of them are on my Celestia page.

This would make a really nice touch to fsgregs educational activity that deals with the Earth and Moon. The educational activity could visit two or three of the Apollo landing sites! Way cool!

What do you think, Frank?

I was unaware of the existance of these. Thanks for the heads-up. Selden, I have just discovered your panorama links and want to incorporate some of them into my existing Activities, as well as into future ones. Activity 9 will be done this Spring. I will incorporate the Apollo panoramas into it.

SkyPilot, thanks for the suggestion.

Frank

Nice to see this is going somewhere!

I did not intend that people following the link should immediately set about trying to copy that particular set of imagery off that website. QuickTime VRML seems not to be designed to allow copying or saving, I expect to protect copyright, etc. Even if you try stitching screen snapshots together, the edge distortion will not let images overlap properly, so that's not a good way either.

Even though I expect the Apollo panorama pictures are 'public domain' as per other NASA goodies, there might be some issue about the work done in manipulating those images to produce VRML panoramas, there is a notice: "All images are credit NASA - Panoramas/QTVR movies ?©2004 Hans Nyberg". I think the proprietry issues lie mainly in the VR sofwtare itself. The subject matter - photos - seem to follow the usual copyright issues.

Apollo panorama material sourced directly from NASA must be OK. Hans Nyberg mentions on his VR site: Original images from The Apollo Image Gallery, so it's all there for you.

The main point of my post was to let people know about the panoramas.

Spiff.