[Beowulf] Re: Re: blackbox on Mars?

[Jim Lux]

At 04:55 PM 10/30/2006, steve_heaton at iinet.net.au wrote:

>G'day all
>
>With my astronomy hat on...
>
>Of course what works in your favour for Earth imaging is that you're not
>struggling to grab photons. Looking up instead of down means your 
>limited by the
>Reynolds number. On near-perfect conditions I think Keck can at best get about
>200mm of clear air. This is where that expensive, whizz bang 
>Adaptive Optics kit
>gets the nod. Need to straighten those wavefronts!
>
>Looking down I suspect you face similar atmos problems. All those 'little
>lenses'. Not sure if the sodium layer would be a lot of help for a guide star.
>Can't remember the altitude. Hmmm... could be from LEO. Regardless, 
>it's easier
>to straighten wavefronts if you know how they're bent in real time.



I think they do blind deconvolution of multiple frames of the same 
subject.  A notoriously compute intensive task, and one suitable for 
a nice cluster.  Who will be the first to image astronauts doing EVA 
with a backyard telescope, firewire camera, and a home 
cluster?  Maybe you could do it when transiting the moon or sun? 
Might hurt, might help.. certainly increases the contrast.  The 
background of the moon might give you a calibration target to work 
with for your image processing (like the guide star). Probably 
depends on the scale of the atmospheric irregularities you're trying 
to calibrate out.