Meteors and the Moon

Moon rising on the night of Perseid meter shower.

Meteors

Perseid meteor shower captured with the Canon's A2200 camera using CHDK to override the exposure to 20 seconds and a script to continuously take pictures till the battery runs out.

But even with ISO set to 1600, the majority of the meteors were to short lived and not bright enough to be captured.

Science & Engineering

Curiosity successfully landed on Mars!

To celebrate here's a 10x enlarged photo of the descent using b-splines.

B-splines "HD"

Full resolution panoramas with nearest pixel values and sub pixel values.

B-splines

What an interesting thing this is.

With it you can resize this:

To this:

Without looking like this:

While used to describe continuous surfaces in 3D models, their ability to produce a value at sub pixel resolutions con be abused here to unfold the 360° panorama more smoothly.

Panorama when unfolding with the nearest pixel to the calculated value:

Panorama when unfolding with the sub pixel value:

The down side is that using brute force to calculate every pixel amounts to couple of hours per full resolution image.

Next step, use science & math to speed things up!

And to finally fix the aspect ration (now that the images are smooth).