Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Apollo 17 VIP Site Anaglyph

NASA ^ | March 15, 2014 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo scene from Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon! The color anaglyph features a detailed 3D view of Apollo 17's Lunar Rover in the foreground -- behind it lies the Lunar Module and distant lunar hills. Because the world was going to be able to watch the Lunar Module's ascent stage liftoff via the rover's TV camera, this parking place was also known as the VIP Site. In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. The crew returned with 110 kilograms of rock and soil samples, more than from any of the other lunar landing sites. Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk (or drive) on the Moon.

[dr_lew]

Oops. Ping that post!

[dr_lew]

As shown below, I think I can accurately reproduce the APOD by simply lining up the images to match the position of the low gain antenna, which looks like a microphone. Note the LM looks just the same, in particular.

The one difference is along the horizon, where I got a thick red strip on the left side, but Aha! Look at the APOD horizon behind the high gain antenna ( i.e. looking through it ) and you will see the red strip matching mine. So I think they just edited this out, where possible. Note the blue strip on the right horizon is still there, and matches mine.

I think they decided to do it this way because the image shift is too extreme with the horizon match method. Even so, the APOD rover anaglyph is still kind of strange because the position shift is mostly in the vertical direction. It still seems to work though!

[Telepathic Intruder]

There does seem to be some shift in the vertical, and no doubt NASA did some post-editing. The #20 post seems the clearest to me, with the sharpest background and the rover seeming to jump in your face. One problem that cannot be fixed, not easily anyway, is that all color monitors are a little bit different, and this one doesn’t exactly match my red-cyan glasses. But perfection is an impossibly lofty dream...