Lab-Tools.com

Stereo Panoramic Viewer
for
Mars Rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity"

Stereo Panorama

On the 6th of January 2004 Nasa released the first stereo panaorama pictures from Mars Rover "Spirit", which landed on the 4th in crater Gusev ...
- this is a simple viewer for stereo panaoramas, for those who do not have fancy stereo viewers.

Load two stereo images, then you can pan left-right and up-down, zoom in and out, and change the brightness and contrast.

To celebrate the success of the Nasa Rover "Spirit" in bringing back colour stereo pictures of crater Gusev on Mars, the following Stereo Panoramic Viewer was written over the last few days, to enable viewers to stereoscopically pan around and zoom into the pictures of Mars, without needing special viewing hardware.

StereoPanorama pans and zooms monochrome and colour stereo-pair panoramas. You can also set brightness and contrast.
StereoPanorama now also displays, pans and zooms non-stereo photos, anaglyptic (red/cyan) stereo images, and both converts anaglyptic back to stereo pairs and stereo-pairs to anaglyptic.

DownLoad viewer : StereoPanorama
(a viewer and manipulator for Panoramic Stereo images.)
DownLoad Left Image : PIA04991_panorama_left.jpg
DownLoad Right Image : PIA04992_panorama_right.jpg
(These are the first stereo panoramic pair from the navigational cameras as per the partial view on the right).
Standalone applications created with APLX for Windows require a 1.6 MByte support library (APLXSupport.dll) to be installed on each machine on which they are to run.
www.microapl.co.uk/APL/player/index.html
This library is freely available for download; go to the above link, download and save the .zip file somewhere convenient, unzip and install.
Then just run the StereoPanorama .exe file, read the stereo panoramas in, and pan and zoom into them - nice playing!
About StereoPanorama :
Written using MicroApl's AplX array language interpreter, this compact application makes good use of the array manipulation capabilities of Apl, MicroApl's implementation aiding the graphic import and windowing interface.

A view into part of the first full 360° B+W stereo pair of panoramic images from "Spirit"'s navagational cameras. The high-resolution cameras return colour panoramic stereo image pairs.
Stereo-pairs can be viewed simply in the following way :
If the eyes are unfocussed, the two pictures can appear as four images;
If the eyes are then set so the left eye looks at the left image and the right eye looks at the right image, the images will appear as a set of three; the overlapping pair will then fuse to give a central stereoscopic view of the scene.
Takes a little practice, then comes easily!
Often used in the world of science, this offers a simple way of seeing in stereo, and can be used to look at stereo images in full colour, unlike when using red-green glasses.

Download versions of StereoPanorama :

The first version of StereoPanorama (0.90) I limited to 100MBytes of workspace; this is fine for the "Spirit" Navcam and Pathfinder panoramas shown here, but may not be O.K. for a stereo pair of full resolution 360° "Spirit" Pancam images when they come out. The default version now has a 300MB workspace, for machines with 512 MByte of RAM, which can cope with a pair of half resolution 360° panoramic images - for unpacking multi-megabyte .jpg files do ensure you have lots of swop space on disk.

Version 0.91 : add 360° degree panorama mode. (139 kByte)
Version 0.94 : add non-stereo mono image mode. (231 kByte)
Version 0.95 : add other modes inc. anaglyptic (red/cyan). (276 kByte)
Version 0.96 : smooth updates - at last! Also pixel interpolation (269 kByte)
Microsoft Windows :
A 100Mbyte workspace version is now available for download as : StereoPanorama-100M-0.96.exe
A 300Mbyte workspace version is now available for download as : StereoPanorama-300M-0.96.exe (default)
Macintosh :
To be done if there is a demand.
Linux :
To be done if there is a demand.

Highly zoomed views into both a picture from the Orbiter and a half resolution colour image from the "Spirit"' Pancam, showing part of the "Eastern Hills".

Come to Lab-Tools for effective hardware and software.
If you like StereoPanorama, and find it helps you see Mars as you have never seen it before, small donations for StereoPanorama are much appreciated, to cover my time and work :
If you would like to click on one or more buttons, you can transfer a pound or ten to me, via secure PayPal.

Thanks :
(pay £1.00)

Much Thanks :
(pay £10.00)

Sites with stereo panoramas :

Nasa Rover "Spirit" images : marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/rover-images/images.html
Nasa Pathfinder/rover images : mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/index1.html
Test stereo panoramas and stereo panorama theory : astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/stereographics/stereopanoramic/

A view into part of a panoramic stereo image pair in colour from an earlier Pathfinder mission.

Comet 17P/Holmes :

Much more recently (2007-11) we have a visitation by comet 17P/Holmes, and having seen an excellent anaglypic stereo picture by Patrick Vantuyne :
http://users.pandora.be/patrick.vantuyne1/ (thanks)
I prepared this full-colour Left/Right stereo pair :
17P-Holmes_2007-11-4+5_BeauWebber_sh_Left.jpg,
derived from a photo by Jack Newton : www.arizonaskyvillage.com,
17P-Holmes_2007-11-4+5_BeauWebber_sh_Right.jpg,
derived from a photo by Ivan Eder : eder.csillagaszat.hu/en.htm,

Oh, these are now Gaussian sharpened images - the right image particularly benefits - Use StereoPanorama to zoom in, then to pan around the halo.

17P-Holmes_2007-11-4+5_BeauWebber_sh_L+R.jpg

Phoenix Mars Lander :

Thanks to Nasa for the great pictures from the Mars Phoenix lander :
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/index.html
I gather that the stereo images will soon be in full colour. The viewer could now do with updating, but still gives a great view of the pictures fron the stereo imager on Phoenix, even though so far they seem to be monocrome.
I prepared two monochrome stereo images from these Nasa Left/Right stereo pairs :
230303main_SS001EDN896306559_11606L1M1.jpg,
230307main_SS001EDN896306559_11606R1M1.jpg,
and
234485main_SS006EFF896755786_1179EL1M1.jpg,
234489main_SS006EFF896755786_1179ER1M1.jpg,