We recently hosted a workshop in our Santa Barbara headquarters at the end of the KITP annual teachers' conference. During the tour around the facilities, one teacher (Steve Cooperman) took some stereograms and made anaglyphs out of them (click on the images to the right, for bigger versions). He has kindly provided us with some very nice examples (you will need to put on old-fashioned red-blue 3D glasses for the full effect). These images of are of our testing rig for the 1m, which currently has 2 co-mounted, smaller telescopes on it. Below Steve has given us an account of how he achieved it.
"Most of my 3D work has always been in the form of "crossed-eye" double images. People can also arrange the images as a "Magic Eye" set of parallel images, too. I prefer the crossed-eye views because I have better control of my eyes that way, but it seems unnatural to most people at first. (You can use either technique in a 3-image sequence of Left-Right-Left, where the Magic-Eye people use the two images on the left, and the Crossed-Eye preferred folks use the two images on the right.)
To take the crossed-eye stereo images, you just take two pictures of the same object but carefully move a few inches to a few yards "to the side", depending on how much parallax you want -- more for distant objects. Try to move the camera so there's no rotation. I usually do this without a tripod, and trim the photos later to match, if need be.
Then, using the graphics program of your choice, you place "the left one on the right" and "the right one on the left", and move them slightly so that they match well.
I've placed some of my more recent ones online, including an infrared shot, and they encompass constellations, 3-d molecular models, and geological formations near Griffith Observatory.
I used to do this completely "by hand", but after our LCOGT meeting, I was using a new version of my preferred graphics program, Picture Window Pro 5.0 when I noticed that one of the new transformations did the same alignments automatically that I used to do by hand, and an additional feature was the ability to do anaglyphs automatically. I tried it, and it worked. (I'd had VERY limited success in the past.)
It is lots of fun to do, and it opens new vistas of visual images for home, school, and Science."
Many thanks, Steve! Why not try it out this weekend!
