Apollo / Surveyor Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze into this
dramatic stereo view from the
surface
of the Moon!
Inspired by last Saturday's APOD,
experimentor Patrick Vantuyne offers this stereo
rendering of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the
Surveyor 3 spacecraft in November of 1969.
To create the
stereo image,
Vantuyne carefully combed through the pictures available
for downloading from the
Apollo
Lunar Surface Journal web site
to find two which would make an appropriate "stereo pair".
He
found a pair that depicted the
captivating scene from only
slightly different viewpoints, approximating the separation
between human eyes.
Combining the two separate pictures,
one tinted red and the other blue-green,
with the correct offset,
produces the stereo effect when viewed using
red/blue glasses, the red filter covering
the left eye.
The color filters
guide each eye to see only the picture with
the correct corresponding viewpoint and the brain interprets the result
as normal stereo
vision.
(Editor's note: While you've
got those
glasses on ...
other web sources of astronomy and space science
stereo images include the
Mars Path Finder archive and a
3D
Tour of the Solar System.)