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STARMUS PRESS RELEASE

June 30, 2016 by FDM Admin

PRESS RELEASE

“Brian May has landed in the Canary Islands to participate in the third STARMUS festival. The festival celebrates Astronomy and Music, and May, a founder member of the STARMUS board, brings his talents to both. This time he has introduced new devices to the stereoscopic world including his latest creation, the Owl Virtual Reality Kit (based on the highly successful OWL 3-D viewer) and a new pocket version of the viewer, the LITE OWL. In addition, May, with the help of his London Stereoscopic Company colleagues, presented a special 12 minute stereoscopic journey into space, entitled “Horizons”. This 3-D experience was offered not on a screen, but as an intimate one-to-one app on smartphones, viewed in 3-D in OWL VR kits, and enjoyed by over 1,000 attendees at the festival. The sound track is a solo guitar piece which Brian recorded on tour with Kerry Ellis in Zlin, Czech Republic.

This year’s STARMUS festival is a tribute to Stephen Hawking, and Brian has dedicated his mesmerising 3-D film to H

JOIN BRIAN MAY FOR A STEREOSCOPIC ADVENTURE IN SPACE

January 13, 2016 by FDM Admin

European Astrofest takes place 5 and 6 February 2016, Kensington Conference & Events Centre, London. Tickets

Brian confirmed as speaker for Friday afternoon session:
A history of astro stereo photography – illustrated with full screen 3-D projection
Brian May, London Stereoscopic Company

Brian with planet

Dr Brian May will bring a new dimension to the conference programme at European AstroFest this year when he takes the audience on a stereoscopic adventure into space. Using cutting-edge 3D projection technology, Brian will explain how stereo photography has been used to capture the wonders of the Universe, from Victorian-era images of the Moon to present day space probes exploring the far-flung regions of our Solar System.

Although best known for his musical talents, Brian has a life-long interest in astronomy and stereoscopic imaging. He was named a science collaborator on the New Horizons Pluto mission and has helped process 3D images from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, exploring comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Brian is a director of the London Stereoscopic Company which publishes stereo cards and books that can be enjoyed using the patented OWL viewer he designed.

Brian’s presentation is at 4:50pm on Friday 5 February. To book your conference pass and to see the full programme visit the European AstroFest website.

Get tips on how to view this stereo image from the London Stereoscopic Company.

ROSETTA’S COMET – NEW STEREO WITH JETS !

November 12, 2015 by FDM Admin

New stereoscopic portrait of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from images captured by Rosetta’s ‘Navcam’ camera.

Comet 67P stereo

For parallel free-viewing or use a stereoscope such as a London Stereoscopic Company OWL viewer. For information on stereo viewing please click here

Photo Details:

Left image: taken April 28, 2015, 05:27:04, at a distance of 150.9 km from the comet’s centre.

Right image: taken April 27, 2015, 16:56:15, at a distance of 134.2 km from the comet’s centre.

Released: Friday 23 October 2015
Source: Rosetta NAVCAM Archive Image Browser operated by the European Space Agency (ESA)

The component images for this stereo pair are to be found in the Rosetta NAVCAM archive image browser, where the Rosetta team release all these images to the public around six months after they are taken. The browser contains thousands of great images to explore.

In this picture we are looking at the 67P Comet three and a half months before perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, so its activity was not yet at maximum.

We see the large ‘lobe’ of the comet (with the Imhotep region in darkness) looming in the foreground, and the smaller lobe well-lit behind it. In processing, we have done some compression of intensities to enhance the faint jets which are here seen forming the comet’s coma, while keeping the highlight detail on the nucleus intact. The 3-D image positively locates the jet activity, even right in the foreground, evidently emanating from the dark part of the large lobe which faces us.

We particularly liked this stereo, and gave it the ‘full polish treatment’. In addition to fine tuning the alignment and optimising levels, the shadows needed to be fixed. In the twelve and a half hours between exposures, which has given us a perfect baseline for great stereo detail, Comet 67P has rotated enough with respect to the Sun for the shadows to have significantly moved. If these discrepancies are left in the stereo image, our eyes are troubled by ‘retinal rivalry’ – ie conflict of information getting to the brain from our two eyes. The only way to sort this out is by individually copying the shadow shapes from the left image to the right, or vice versa, by hand. Each ‘patch’ has to be morphed to match the surface it’s being attached to, so the 3-D shape of the terrain is not disturbed, to keep the final image as ‘real’ as possible.

In twelve and a half hours, the jets have not perceptibly changed, and their three-dimensional structure in space seen here is completely real. It’s a rare chance to get an informative glimpse of the 3-D structure of a coma at short range, showing the way jets apparently orientate themselves perpendicular to the surface of the nucleus they emerge from, and stream out for some way in straight lines.

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

Stereo created by Claudia Manzoni and Brian May using these images in the Rosetta archive image browser :

http://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/picture.php?/29025/category/119
http://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/picture.php?/29030/category/119

Big thanks to Rosetta mission boss Matt Taylor for his help and approval, and to Joel Parker for his continued help in locating suitable image pairs.

Bri

ROSETTA ON FIRE !

September 17, 2015 by FDM Admin

Free-view this parallel stereo image (help is here) or view it in your patent London Stereoscopic Company OWL stereoscope !

Rosetta On Fire

Creds: ESA/ROSETTA/NAVCAM, Matt Taylor, Bernhard Geiger. Stereo by BM.

This pair of images was kindly thrown to me by Rosetta mission boss Matt Taylor himself (and colleague Bernhard Geiger) – as a challenge, I guess !

Unlike the last Rosetta stereo on this Soapbox, derived from the very high quality Narrow Angle Camera of the Osiris science instrument, this time we’re looking at the output of Rosetta’s wider angle navigation camera – and there was some noise and disturbance to deal with – but this is an unusual view of Comet 67P. From this angle, as the amazing Rosetta probe, directed from ESA Rosetta Mission Control on Earth, passes along a trajectory some 208 miles from the comet, we see the comet ‘top down’, and it looks like a burning cinder in the sky. Of course it’s not burning, but this is close to the warmest it will get in this orbit, around +30 or so degrees Centigrade, since it’s close to its Perihelion (13th August), seen on August 8th, around a month ago. We’re looking at a side-on view of the sunlit part of the object, also giving us a view of the dark side of the comet. The unlit portion of the comet’s surface is very dark, and we wouldn’t see it at all except for the fact that it’s silhouetted against part of the dusty coma. With the magic of 3-D, however, now that these two images are suitably aligned, we can clearly make out the C67P’s three-dimensional shape, its two ‘lobes’ one behind the other in our line of sight. There’s also evidence here for the ever-changing pattern in the eruptions from its surface as it warms up. Left of centre we can see a jet in the left image ‘flashing’ in our three-dimensional view, indicating that a jet was present when the left hand image was captured, but not the right.

The times logged for the two component images are

2015 08 12 T 09 05 03 and
2015 08 12 T 09 24 52

So about 20 minutes between these exposures. At its speed in the comet’s frame of reference of around 2 miles per hour, in this time it’s covered about two thirds of a mile, and so this is the baseline of this stereo pair. My sincere thanks to Matt for making this account scientifically bullet-proof.

Cheers

Bri