About the “View From L5” Banner
The banner for the HAL5 Web Page is a composite image made possible
by the merger of the latest electronic image processing software
(for the PC) with good old-fashioned manual painting by some very
talented artists -- and, of course, the wonderful open door policy
of the Internet’s World Wide Web.
The Elements
- Most (the leftmost 80%) of the banner was taken from the top
third of “Island One”, a JPEG formatted image
downloaded from the Space Studies Institute (SSI)
Web Page. As requested, I am giving due credit (and many THANKS!) to SSI on this
page! I would also like to thank the artist for painting the original
“Island One”.
- The remaining part (the moon, rightmost 20%) of the banner was taken from a
small portion of the cover of
Out
of The Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth, a wonderful
“coffee table book” by artists William K. Hartmann, Ron Miller, and Pamela Lee
(who painted the cover). The cover image was selected over other moon photographs
and paintings because it had the same sun-lighting angle as the Earth image in
“Island One”.
- Out
of The Cradle was first published in 1984 by Workman
Publishing Co. Inc., New York. Its 192 pages contain both diagrams
and inspiring paintings depicting humanity’s present and hopeful
future in outer space.
- An earlier work titled
The
Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System, by Ron Miller and
William K. Hartmann, was published in 1981. Its 192 pages contain both photographs
and great paintings of every planet, and many satellites and asteroids,
in our Solar system.
The Tools
- JPEG Moon image scanned in via Logitech ScanMan 256, a black
& white hand-held scanner with 100, 200, 300, and 400 dpi
resolution, plus line-art capability.
- JPEG image editing via Logitech FotoTouch Color software,
version 1.10 (which came with the ScanMan 256).
- JPEG to GIF interlaced image file conversion via LView Pro
shareware, version 1.B2 (downloaded off Internet).
The Process
- After downloading “Island One” to a JPEG file, FotoTouch
Color was used to crop the image to banner-size, so that the Earth
(near the top in the original painting) was vertically-centered
in the image.
- The ScanMan 256, with a setting on 100 dpi, was used to scan
in the moon image off the book cover.
- FotoTouch Color was then used to convert the black & white
moon image into color; then the moon was given a slightly brownish-violet
hue, all while keeping the surrounding space dark enough to mate
with the Earth image.
- FotoTouch Color copy & paste was then used to mate just
the moon image (a portion of what was scanned) with the Earth
image. The result image was then fine-tuned by cropping any unwanted
overlap; then saved in JPEG format.
- Unfortunately, FotoTouch Color version 1.10 could not save in GIF
format. LView Pro shareware does, fortunately.
It was used to convert the JPEG image into a GIF interlaced one.
- Now the HAL5 Web Page had a great banner image -- but of a
“View From L4”! From L5, the
Earth appears on the
left and the moon on the right (unless you are standing upside-down
-- which is easy to do in space). Rather than change the name
of HAL5 to HAL4 (which would upset many members!) or adopt the
lame “upside-down” excuse, the GIF image was “flipped”
horizontally using LView Pro, then resaved as an interlaced GIF
image file.
- With all due apologies to the original artists, the resulting
image is truly a “View From L5” -- hopefully!
Send queries and suggestions via E-Mail to:
HAL5 @ nsschapters.org
This file was last modified on Saturday, 05-Nov-2005 02:26:36 EST
