Word Of The Day!

The word of the day - anaglyph, a method of viewing 3D scenes! Those who know me also know I'm a 3D nut - there are lots of posts (29 to date!) where I've given our followers headaches trying to fuse pictures to show depth in an scene. After the flight with Chuck the other week, and a plethora of images taken as we fly along, I needed a method to show off the 3D effect, and a new method (for me) is the anaglyph method. In previous posts, I've presented the images separately to freeview them by either the cross-eyed or parallel-view method. The advantage of those is that with practice, you generally don't need a viewer. The disadvantage is that most get frustrated, and images need to remain small, and detail is lost. With anaglyph viewing, each image is tinted red or cyan, and using cheap cardboard glasses, each eye sees the appropriate image for your brain to reconstruct the image. So if you have the red and blue-green glasses, get them out - time to put them to use!

By the way, I found the method used to make these from Googling "how to make an anaglyph" and one of the top returns was "Simplest Method of Making Anaglyphs", and sure enough, it is only a couple steps, in fact, it may be simpler than the work I had to go through to make the two-image pairs previously... Since many of you may not have the colored glasses, I'll continue to provide an alternate, the cross-eyed method works best for me - when looking at the image pair, cross your eyes slightly to view the right image with your left eye and vice-versa. You should see a center image that shows depth. Try it first on the smaller thumbnails before clicking on the image for the full-size image...

First up is a pair taken as we flew past Kitt Peak National Observatory on our outbound flight, our height just above that of the Observatory. Taken a few seconds apart, our motion provided the baseline for these "hyperstereos", whenever the baseline is farther than your eye separation. Again, at left is the cross-eyed version, and at right is the anaglyph view.

I love these hyper-stereos as the depth of the scene is accentuated.  Nearly each dome at the Observatory stands out and depth can be seen almost to the distant mountains. 

After our flight out to western Pima County, our return brought us back past Baboquivari Mountain. It is a spectacular peak - I've had the pleasure of hiking to the top 3 or 4 times back a few decades ago. It is considered by the Tohono O'odham tribe the center of the universe and home to their deity, I'itoi, Elder Brother. Since it was out my window on the right side of the plane, I took several series of images, one of which I made into this stereo pair. Again, with the wide baseline depth details can be seen from the incredibly rugged foothills to distant mountains. Interestingly, in the anaglyph at full size, I can almost retrace the hiking route up the northern side of the peak...

On our return trip we were at about 10,000 foot elevation, so about 3,000 feet above both Baboquivari and Kitt Peak. As we passed the Observatory again, another hyper-stereo is shown, showing depth details from domes to distant canyons past Baboquivari 15 miles away.   I'm really loving the anaglyphs, particularly with these B&W IR shots, since they interfere less with color fidelity, and the larger sized images retain more detail than the necessarily small individual frames for free-viewing.

So I'm looking for feedback, particularly if you have the red/cyan glasses.  I'm guessing that would be the favorite way for viewing these, so since I'm boss around here, will likely continue, perhaps continuing presenting the cross-eyed view too for now.