06.30.14

Voyager


In 1979, during its final approach to Jupiter, Voyager 1 sent back a stunning sequence of images taken over 28 days.   Thirty-five years later, in December 2013, several amateur astronomers from Sweden started "Voyager 3," a joint project to recreate this sequence with their own images.  Although the weather in December and March was good, in January and February of 2014 it  was the worst Sweden had seen in decades.  But, good geographical spread across Sweden helped them complete the project. More than 1 million frames over 90 days resulted in 650 still images. They used an open-source code, Winjupos, to map the 560 still images into cylindrical and polar projections. They were then stitched into complete maps that covered all of Jupiter's surface. Over the course of three months, the amateurs were able to get 18 maps that were longitudinally complete. To fill in gaps of time and make a smooth animation, the amateurs used morphing techniques to generate frames that were intermediate between the dates of each of these complete maps. The resulting smooth maps were then processed  so as to simulate the Voyager viewpoint as a function of its flyby position relative to Jupiter.

The amateurs involve were Daneil Sundström, Torbjön Holmqvist, Peter Rosén (the Project initiator], Göran Stand,  Johan Warell, Martin Högberg, and Roger Utas.

Besides, Winjupos, Photoshop CS6 was used for everything (except creating any clouds that didn't exist in Jupiter), FantaMorph (from Abrosoft) for morphing sequences, and StarryNightPro+ for simulating flybys and animations.

The background music "Crystallize" by Lindsey Stirling is used with "Fair Use" permission.

For a longer look at the voyager video please check out the Voyager Media Gallery