Pan and zoom among 400 images from Curiosity's cameras.
If you were standing next to the Mars rover Curiosity, this is what you’d see. Estonian photographer and editor Andrew Bodrov stitched together 407 images from two Curiosity cameras to come up with this interactive panorama.
The mosaic covers 90,000 x 45,000 pixels, and includes zoomable images from Curiosity’s Narrow Angle Camera and Medium Angle Camera, both located on the Mastcam system, which makes up the rover’s head. The NAC’s focal length is 100 mm, and 295 images from this system make up the bulk of the image. The and MAC’s focal length is 34 mm, and Bodrov said he used those to fill in the gaps. If you look closely, you’ll see some spots that appear in lower resolution--those are from the MAC.
The camera can only do so much, Bodrov notes. “It is only 2 megapixels, which by today's standards is not huge. Of course, flying these electronic components from Earth to Mars, and having them survive the radiation and other hazards, means that they were not able to just use off-the-shelf cameras,” he said in an email to Popular Science.
This project took him about two weeks, including time to collect all the images, stitch them together and retouch them. Bodrov added the sky in Photoshop, and dropped in a photo of Curiosity, too, from a previous panorama he made earlier this year.
Bodrov is a member of the International Virtual Reality Photography Association and has plenty of other amazing panoramas, which you can check out here.
If you thought you had to pay an arm and a leg for a top-notch musical notation editor, think again. MuseScore is powerful, versatile, and free. It may not offer the bells and whistles provided by some of the paid competition, but the core functionality is there: WYSIWYG creation and editing, support for unlimited staves, unlimited score length, a plug-in architecture, and excellent-looking notation.
You can compose intricate music with MuseScore.
The more I played with MuseScore, the more impressed I became. There's finer control over the size and spacing for nearly every object: clef, stave, accidental, performance mark, etc. than most users will need. It has MIDI input, Music XML import and export, its own internal sounds, and support for ASI0 (a low latency audio standard) and JACK MIDI (a free patch bay that works between MIDI programs), though not the more popular Rewire (another patch bay/signal router).
If you're used to Sibelius or Finale, you'll probably feel right at home with MuseScore. I'd prefer a simple left-click to do something other than just drag the page around, but that's me. One area where the program hits the nail on the head is allowing you to drag note modifiers and performance markings directly to the notes they will operate on. Brilliant.
Also brilliant is allowing users to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, though the process could be streamlined a bit. MuseScore is as challenged in the area of mouse editing as the rest of the notation industry, which has never seemed to fully grasp the drag-and-drop concept. But all in all, it's as easy for entering symbols and editing as the competition is.
