While downloading yesterdays launch day panorama (medium resolution), i saw the rain sensor measurment climbing climbing above its usual zero[*]. I managed to take a couple of single frames as well as a panorama. Most of that is still on the probe, i was running low on power and had to stop downloading.
That also stems from the fact i was experimenting with taking images during the probes first night.
But first things first, let's take things in order...
Launch day panorama (full color)
Here it is, in all its medium resolution glory:
Yesterday i posted the colorized version. I used the greyscale plus the much lower resolution color thumbnail and a lot of fumbling in Gimp to produce it. I was actually not that far off:
Night testing
During the night, i tested the porch LED again as well as the ability to photograph stars. Excuse the poor image quality, these are scaled up thumbnails.
The porch LED seems to work fine, so i'm hopefull that i will be able to attract insects:
But i'm afraid, taking images of the night sky might be out. There are a few power LEDs that i completely forgot until it was too late in the build process of WaterFeeler2. I'll have to take a closer look into the green and blue channels to see if we can detect stars or not, but the reflections from those LEDs seem to overpower everything:
Those red LEDs are not very bright, you can't even see them when the porch light is on. But they are certainly enough to cause mayhem when i do long exposure shots.
Of course, we wouldn't even be able to see stars in images with a resolution that low (i still have to pull higher resolution images in the next few days). But it doesn't look good.
Rain
The primary mission goal of WaterFeeler2 is to "find the water". We just did find a whole lot more in the form of rain.
Of course, the rain sensor detected it:
As mentioned above, i managed to take a few pictures (and a panorama) with PanCam. Most of that is still "on the probe", meaning i haven't downloaded it yet. But i got two medium resolution SF (single frame) images on the ground, one high resolution SF image as well as thumbnails for everything else.
I wont show all the thumbnails here, they are not much to look at - if you are interested in them (as well as more "in the works stuff"), you can take a look into the official Garden Space Agency source code respository. It includes all images, source code, data dumps and (nearly all) the graphs i'm showing on this blog.
First of is a look at the porch (with the porch light on full white) in medium resolution. There is a lot of spray on the camera window:
Looking up, again in glorious medium resolution, we can see that water droplets collet on our roof, e.g. the Solar panel:
Looking straight ahead in high resolution, we can see that every (external) part of the probe got soaking wet. There is even a big, nice droplet hanging from the edge of the panel:
So far, the probe seems to withstand bad weather quite well, i just hope i wont get too much dirt on the camera window.
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