Cory Creates

 Finished, after three attempts, and two-plus hours rendering in Blender. The final video shows 10 years of Mars Daily Global Maps (MGDMs) taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's MARCI camera, which images (almost) the entire surface of Mars every day. I found those images, from 2006 - 2016, processed and released by the Harvard Dataverse , which I then strung together into a single video of 4:20 (which you can see here ). The final video, below, takes that video and overlays the map onto a sphere in Blender. Gaps in the data, ie the black and random colored areas, are missing data from MRO. There was also a gap in some some data during the "B mission subphase", which causes an apparent image-jump. I also removed some of the original data frames (ie, some individual MDGMs) because large parts were missing. Enjoy, and please leave comments or questions!

 In my last blog post I strung together 10 years of Mars global surface images (Mars Daily Global Maps or "MDGMs") into one video of over four minutes. After completing that project, which wasn't overly technical but took time to research and process, I thought it would be pretty cool to overlay that video onto a sphere, similar to the shape of a planet, which is what Mars is. Blender is a great platform for doing this and there are many tutorials online to get started, overlaying 2D images to 3D shapes, including videos. I'm still working on the final render, but here's an intermediary result which I'm quite proud of. The final render, which will be pretty cool, is rendering now. I would like to work on image/video interpolation to fill in the missing image data, which are displayed as black spots all around the globe. I'm aware that technology like this exists, but it's a topic that I will have to learn about in order to complete. If you have worked...

The planet Mars, as seen from the MarCI on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), from November 2006 - October 2016.  I took publicly available MRO images and strung them together to create this one video. As far as I know no other person or organization has put together such a long string of images into one video showing the entire surface! This wasn't a technically challenging project, but it took time to find all the images, do some research to understand them, and put everything together into one video. Do you know anything about image/video interpolation? It would be great to find a way to make whole video flow better, and fill in the blank/black spaces. Blank/black areas are missing data in the images (MRO doesn't get 100% of the planet every day), and some of the red and blue colors in each image are due to some portion of the data missing (MarCI has several cameras, but they don't ALL get ALL the data ALL the time). Consequently, some images were of such low q...

 Over the most recent holiday weekend in Thailand ( October 23rd is Chulalongkorn Day ) it was great to get out of the city and visit the province of Ratchaburi, just west of Bangkok and bordering Myanmar. There are quite a few hiking trails in the area and we chose Khao Laem Suan Phueng, apparently a well-known trail and frequented by trail-runners, day-hikers (like us), and I guess anyone else who's interested in getting outside! Since I enjoy data I tracked the hike on my Garmin watch, which provided location data (in addition to heart-rate, timing, steps, etc). I was able to pull that out (with help from  Garmin ,  this YouTuber , and  this data science guy ). I also  wrote a little script to extract and transform the data  in C# using Visual Studio, posting it to GitHub. It seems that not so many people have extracted their data, but it's fun solving problems that no one has considered!  Anyway, below are the results from importing the location da...