LHST Overview

Imaging lessons for teachers

Table of contents
Notes to first time imaging Teacher
An Introduction to Image Processing - a Primer
Lesson 1 - Jupiter Blues

Lesson 1a:

Lesson 1b:

Lesson 1c:

Lesson 1d:

ADVANCED IMAGING WORK

Notes to first time imaging Teacher for Imaging lessons

Helpful hints!

1) Make sure you have gone through a dry run of these 4 mini lessons. That way
if you have problems you will not have them with 30 students breathing down
your neck.

2) Make copies of all image files ("file to duplicate" whatever file is
selected or highlighted) you let the students use. Again, do not use your
original image files. The reason for this is that your students will no doubt
change the images. If they accidentally save the changed image with the same
file name as the original, you will need to have a backup image file available.

3) Allocate the appropriate amount of memory for each lesson.
Lessons 1a, b and d use only one Image. That image is about 640 kilobytes.
Lesson 1c uses two small images (less then 60k).
To take actions that require undo/clipboard/buffer use, set the clip board to
640kb. To do this go to the options menu, after starting NIH Image. In the
options menu you will find an item called "Preferences". Once you select
preferences you can set the undo/clipboard/buffer to whatever you want.
The program itself requires about 3300 Kilobytes (3.3 megabytes),
depending on what version of NIH Image you have (for instance NIH Image
version 1.57 asks for 4,000 Kilobytes, for a Mac LC type of Mac)

4) If this is the first time your learners have seen an image of another
planet, on the computer, be prepared for some "Wows."
Students respond strongly to imaging. Because of this
response, I suggest you allow the students to open the image they will be
working on and provide them with a chance to play with it for fun before they start the lesson. I
might add that changing the "Look Up" table, making surface plots and
magnifying really grabs them.

5) Middle School students (my two 7th grade classes are doing Live From Hubble
Space Telescope this semester) do not see things that might be obvious to
learners at other points in their intellectual development, so, when you ask
them to, for instance describe what they see, try white board work, prompts, word
banks, Observation banks, jig sawing and tea party techniques may help focus
their young eyes.

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An Introduction to Image Processing

A Primer for the teacher (instead of an apple;-)

A look forward: I have developed this series of small lessons to give
learners using the Live From Hubble Space Telescope project a new set of
skills and a new set of tools. The skill set engages learners in the
study and analysis of computer pictures. The tool set is a free software
program that runs on any Mac. That program is called NIH Image. It is
available everywhere on the Internet. You will find the home address for
this software in the lesson plan under software requirements. You can
also bring the software to your own Mac by going to the
Fundamental Tools
home page.

In designing the introductory mini-lessons, I have shaped the skill and tool
sets to meet 3 criteria.
The first criterion is to make the lessons understandable for Mac
users new to image processing in education.
The second criterion is that when the learner has completed the lessons
they will be able to study images created during the Live From Hubble
project (those images are specifically of Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto).

The third criterion is to give learners the capacity to do the same kinds
of Imaging science, in parallel, with the 3 principal investigators (The
scientists are known as PIs for short). They are

Heidi Hammel(Neptune),
Marc Buie (Pluto) and
Reta Beebe (Jupiter).

The first criterion would never have been accomplished had it not been for my
long association and training with a world class leader in the field of Image
Processing in Education. This organization passed through my life, at a
Computer Using Educators (CUE) Conference, at a time when I was struggling with
visualizing information in the service of education. They are the Center for
Image Processing in Education (CIPE) based at the University of Arizona.
And if
your appetite has been whetted by these lessons, please do yourself and your
students a favor and make your own connection with this organization. Contact
information is found in my Introduction to Imaging in Education document on
the Live From Hubble Space Telescope home page.

The second and third criteria have been met by discussing, with the PIs, their
work, using the Hubble, on the three planets. Thanks to Heidi Hammel
(Neptune), Marc Buie (Pluto) and Reta Beebe (Jupiter) as well as their teams and
the Live From Hubble Space Telescope team. In addition I have read the
proposals these three scientists have submitted, as applications for getting
Hubble Imaging time allocated to their (and our) scientific endeavors.

In the proposals the scientists submitted, they said they are
"... characterizing, describing, modeling and defining through
wavelength-dependent imaging, long lived cloud features, new features,
discrete features, storm system changes, vertical structure and horizontal
motion."

As you work through the electronic field trip and do the imaging you might need
the find following image information, formulas and relationships useful:

cyc5red.tif -about 640kb,lossless format,
image at 953 nm, taken on Oct. 5, 1995 at 10:32:16 UT

cyc5blue.tif -about 640kb,lossless format,
image at 410 nm, taken on Oct. 5, 1995 at 10:48:16 UT

cyc5mapred.tif - about 65kb, lossy format,
map projection from cyc5red.tif. Centered on -22.66
deg. latitude nad 242.57 deg. longitude. Same sampling as the other maps.

cyc5mapblu.tif -about 65kb, lossy format,
similar projection, same coordinates.

410 nanometers is in the blue part of the visible spectrum.

953 nanometers is in the red part of the visible spectrum.

1 Astronomical unit (AU) is the distance from the Sun to the earth. Mercury is
about a third of one AU, and Pluto is about 40 AUs.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is about 20,000 km wide, east to west.

Jupiters dark bands are called "belts"and the bright bands, zones.

About 11 Earth diameters is equal to one Jupiter diameter.

To convert from degrees/day at the longitude relevant to the Jupiter Images I
use for the mini lessons, use the following formula:
1) deg/day to km/day, multiply by 1238.52
2) deg/day to km/hour, multiply by 51.61
3) deg/day to miles/hour, multiply by 32.07

Universal time zone to Local time zone
Time Zone To Convert UT to your Local Time Zone
ET -5 HOURS FROM UT
CT -6
MT -7
PT -8

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Lesson Plan
Lesson 1 (1a, 1b, 1c, 1d)
1a=making raw observations
1b=magnifying the image
1c=processing the image
1d=Analyzing Jupiter

Lesson Plan for Activities
Jupiter Blues - Making Observations: one feature, one pixel, one array at a
time: An Introduction to Image Processing

Target audience
+/-Middle school.

General Objective
Introduce learners to image processing tools within NIH Image.

Measurable objective
Given an image of Jupiter and the software NIH Image, the student will
report on their observations. Choose, from the image, a grid or array,
7 pixels by 7 pixels in size. Once chosen the student will map the x,y
coordinates and the luminosity or brightness value of each pixel in their array.
Finally the students will try and find each team's chosen feature.
Hints given will be a 7 by 7 array of location (x,y values) and pixel values.
Magnification ratio will also be stated, as will the team names.

Specific tool set developed:
magnifying glass, coordinate tool, grabber hand, zoom to fit (the
image) button, info table, LUT, LUT tool, color tables, filtering, selection
tool, using macro (to generate ascii dump of selected area of image)

Specific skill set used:
Opening image, moving around image, identifying and singling out
pixels, processing image, observing and noting differences, features and
structures, reading info window, choosing and reporting on array (group of
pixels).

Activity Concepts:
Use of Cartesian coordinate system, scale, digital imaging and scientific
endeavor.

Vocabulary building:
Planetary astronomy, coordinate math, tool specific (hardware, software),
locating what is observed.

Prerequisite skills:
Macintosh driver's license. Among other fundamental Mac literacy skills, you
need to know how to manage your Macintosh memory, both hard drive and RAM.
You also need to know how to navigate the desktop and use the finder.
Computer Painting or drawing experience helpful.

Correlated Activities from Teacher's Guide
Activities 2E, page 26, Pictures from Outer Space. Found in the Live From
the Hubble Space Telescope Teachers Guide.

Hardware
Color Mac with following minimum memory available:
Hard Drive needs at least 4 Megabytes free space.
Ram needs at least 3.3 Megabytes free space.

Software
NIH Image Freeware for your particular flavor of Mac. This program is
in many places on the Internet.
Most Mac user groups have it. Any store that
carries shareware/freeware software will have it and it is on
several publicly accessible computers on the Web.
NIH Image has a World Wide Web home page. To get there, point your web
browser to the following address

http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/Default.html
Go there Now!

Activity Images
The images are available at the Live From Hubble Space Telescope Home
page.

cyc5blue w/txt.tif (lesson 1a,b,c)
cyc5mapblu.tif (lesson 2d)
cyc5mapred.tif (lesson 2d)
JupiterWS.tif (Advanced enrichment activity. Correlated with activity 3A in
the Teachers guide) go to the following address to get it

Image Info
This image file is about 640 kilobytes (KB) in size. It has 256
shades of gray. The picture is 800 pixels wide and 800 pixels high. The
file format is Tagged Information File Format (TIFF). It is a picture of
Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope during a picture taking event
called cycle 5. The event took place on Oct 5, 1995 at 10:48:16 universal
Time (UT). The image was taken through the Wide Field Planetary Camera. The
photographer put a blue filter in front of the camera. With this blue
filter, the image is what the camera saw at 410 nano meters (nm) of the
visual spectrum. The origin is located in the left lower corner (x=0,y=0)

Teaching Strategies
Facilitation and management of learner learning by complex instruction set,
using hands on, constructionist, exploration, teaming and cross team
teaching.

Learning Log format
Date-
Name-
Period-
Tools I used-
What I did-
What I learned-
I have the following questions or problems-

NIH Image Citation
Analysis performed on a Macintosh computer using the public domain NIH Image
program (developed at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and available from
the Internet by anonymous FTP from zippy.nimh.nih.gov or on floppy disk
from the National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Virginia, part
number PB95-500195GEI.
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Lesson 1a: Jupiter Blues, Making observations: An
introduction to Image Processing

NOTES AND FACT SHEET FOR THE TEACHER
If this is the first time your learners have seen an image of another
planet, on the computer, be prepared for some "wows."
Students respond strongly to imaging. Because of this response,
I suggest you allow the students to open the image they will be working on and
provide them with time to play with it for fun before they start the lesson. I will say that changing
the Look Up table, making surface plots and magnifying really grabs them.
This "playing with the image" can easily take one period.

In this activity the learner is asked to make raw observations first. This
may require coaching to focus learner's eyes on areas of the image. Starting
a word bank to help learners describe what they are seeing helped my students.
After that bank was built, we built an observation bank.

Visiting a weather site on the Internet, looking at the weather report in a
paper, or discussing the weather images will help jog the students memory
when asked to relate what they think they are looking at with something they
have seen before. Meteorological terms are appropriate in building learner
ability to describe observations and speculate on what they are seeing.

Jupiter Blues, Making observations: An introduction to Image Processing

Your job is to analyze and report on the picture of Jupiter taken by the Hubble
Space Telescope in Oct, 1995. You need to report to the other teams any
evidence you have of the varied (heterogeneous) nature of the structures and
features observed on Jupiter. Follow the directions below to analyze the image.

Step 1a) Launch NIH Image.

Step 2a) Go up to the File menu in the Command with your mouse.

Step 3a) Drag down the file menu and let go at the word "Open".

Step4a) Double click fast on the image file titled: cyc5blue w/txt.tif

Step 5a) In the tools menu is a picture of a hand. This tool is called the
Grabber hand.

Select this tool by clicking on it once.

Put your mouse arrow, now looking like the grabber hand, over the image.

Hold down the mouse button and move the mouse. This is how you can move around
any image.

If you want to see what the entire picture looks like, click once on the Zoom
box in the upper right corner of the Jupiter image window. NIH Image will
change, zoom in (by scaling) the entire picture so it will fit in the window.
Just click in the zoom box again if you want to see the original image.

Step 6a) Describe what you see by making observation notes:

Look for different colored regions, structures or features.

Note in your description what direction (left, right, up and down) the features
are oriented?

Note in your description what areas look calm and what areas appear to have
violent storm like activity.

Note in your description where the feature you are describing is in
relationship to the top, bottom, side or in space around the planet.

After completing your observation notes, hypothesize, suggest, propose and
speculate on what you think you are seeing. In other words do you think
you are seeing mountains or large bodies of water (geological features) or
clouds and storms (meteorological features)?

Explain in your proposal what knowledge you already have or pictures you have
observed in the past that leads you to state you are looking at certain
planetary features? (hint- What in your background leads you to think you
are looking at a planet?)
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Student Handout
Lesson 1b
Jupiter Blues: Magnifying pixels: An introduction to Image Processing.

Other tools in NIH Image let you study further the image of Jupiter.

Step1b) Again start up NIH Image and open the image of Jupiter. The file is
called cyc5blue w/txt.tif

Step2b) In the Tools window you will see a picture of a magnifying glass.
Select the magnifying glass and click at least 3 times, any where on the image.

A) What information changes in the title bar when you magnify the image?

Click several times on the picture. Watch the title bar of the Jupiter window
as you use the magnifying glass. Now go back to the Tools window and double
click fast on the magnifying glass tool.

B) How do you reset the magnifying glass tool?

Magnify your Jupiter image. Now hold down the key on the keyboard that
has the word options written on it. With the options key down click on the
image again. Let go of the options key and click again on the image.

C) Describe what happens when you use the option key with the magnifying glass?
NOTE-Do you notice the change in the arithmetic sign inside the magnifying
glass? With your image magnified use the Grabber hand tool to move around
the image.

D) What do you think the ratio in the title bar means?
E) Write the following ratios as a multiplication problem? Then solve the
problem?

2:1

16:1

64:1

How many times do you need to click in the middle of the Great Red Spot (GRS)
to take up the entire window?
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Lesson 1c
Jupiter Blues: processing the image: An introduction to Image Processing.

In this mini-lesson you will process 2 images of the Great Red Spot (GRS).
These two images have been extracted from 2 larger images showing the entire
planet Jupiter. The images were taken through 2 different colored filters (red
and Blue) by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

The information below is for the two images you will be using:

Image with file name=cyc5mapred.tif
- map projection from cyc5red.tif. Centered on -22.66
deg. latitude nad 242.57 deg. longitude. Same sampling as the other maps.
image at 953 nm, taken on Oct. 5, 1995 at 10:32:16 Universal Time

Image with file name=cyc5mapblu.tif
- map projection from cyc5blue.tif. Centered on -22.66
deg. latitude nad 242.57 deg. longitude. Same sampling as the other maps.
image at 410 nm, taken on Oct. 5, 1995 at 10:48:16 Universal Time
Your job is to discover, through image processing, features associated with the
Great Red Spot.

1d) Launch NIH Image and open the image with file name
cyc5mapred.tif

2d) Now open the second image, the same way you opened the first. The 2nd.
file name is cyc5mapblu.tif

3d) Go to the Windows menu in the command line on the far right side and let go
at the item "Tile Images". The images will be tiled side-by-side for your
inspection.

4d) First, you are going to apply a different group of colors to the image of
the Great Red Spot.
Even though the colors are going to change, the luminosity values (v) will
remain the same. You do this by changing the Look Up Table (LUT). Go to
the menu called Options in the command line. Go down to the item called
Color tables and drag over to the lateral menu. Go down to the item
called Fire-1 and let go.

You have just changed the Lookup Table (LUT) for one of your images. You can adjust the LUT
with the LUT tool in the tools window. IT is the horizontal line with a
vertical arrow sticking out top and bottom. Click on this tool and move up and
down in the LUT window, noting the change.

5d) To prove to yourself that luminosity values do not change when applying
different LUTs (groups of colors), choose one pixel out of your image and write
down its x,y and pixel value. (note-remember to use the coordinate tool
and the info table to get your data)
x___
y___
v___

Now go Options to grayscale and remeasure that pixel's luminosity. Write down
the values.
x___
y___
v___
Next.....

6d) Another way to look for features of the GRS is to process the image with
filters. Unlike LUT changes, filtering or processing an image directly impacts
the images luminosity value.

(note- to apply a filter to just one part of your images, select that part with
the rectangle tool. It is the tool to the right of the magnifying glass in the
tools window and looks like a row of marching ants when applied)

In the program NIH Image you process images from the "Process" menu.
Experiment with
different LUT options and filter options on both images, getting a feel for
what tools give the most information about the features known as the Great Red
Spot.
(NOTE- DO NOT SAVE ANY CHANGES TO ANY IMAGE WHEN CLOSING)

7d) Now close all images, without saving any changes.

Re-open both images again.

Go to and select "Load Macros" in the "Special" Menu in the command line.

Select "More Macros" from the macro folder which should be in your NIH Image
Folder.

Now one of the selections in your special menu is "ASCII Dump".

Now select a portion of one image that is about one tenth of an inch. With the
selection made, go to the "ASCII Dump" in the "Special" Menu and let go.

Click once back on the image with your selection and filter it once from the
process menu.

Now redue the ASCII Dump and compare the number tables. Is there a difference?

(note- you can, with the same selection maintained, go to the "Export Selection
as" in the "File" menu. In the Save as dialog box select "Text". Open up your
favorite spreadsheet tool and graph the ASCII file).

If so why?

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Lesson 1d
Jupiter Blues: Analyzing Jupiter one array of pixels at a time- Introduction
to image processing

NOTES FOR THE TEACHER

The outcome of all these mini-lessons yields fruit in this lesson. You might
want to split the students up into teams. The goal of this exercise (I called it the
"Mystery Map game") is to choose a 49 pixel array (7x7) somewhere on the planet
that the other team cannot find. The only information that each team will
give is the hints sheet. On the hints sheet should be all the pixels, team
names, opponent team names and magnification level. You should review the
hints sheets if you have younger learners to make sure it is properly completed.

If the learners are struggling with the array concept, print out an ascii
(American Standards for Computer Information Interchange) dump and use the
x,y lines to visually prompt them into recognizing the patterns occurring
across each coordinates line.

Finally fine adjustment of the rectangle tools selection area can be done
more easily under high magnification. It is also easier to move the selection
around. If learners are struggling with the scalability of a selection of
pixels (they keep selecting arrays that are 50 by 50 instead of 7 by 7), ask
them to zoom to fit the entire image to check their selections scales. Any
selection more than a fraction of a millimeter, or so when zoomed to fit is
to big a selection.

Lesson 1d
Jupiter Blues: Analyzing Jupiter one array of pixels at a time-
Introduction to image processing

You will find two more tools handy in your effort to analyze this image using
NIH Image. They are the Coordinate Tool (I call it the cross hair tool) and the
info window. The coordinate tool lets you pick one point on the image at a time
very accurately. The info window displays information as you experiment with the
image. In this activity we are interested in locating pixels using the x value,
the y value and the luminosity or brightness value. The luminosity value is the
pixel value.

1d) Start NIH Image and open the same image as before (cyc5blue w/txt.tif).

2d) Go to the menu labeled Windows, drag down that menu selecting info. The
info window should pop up to the top of the desktop.

3d) Grab the info window by the title bar and drag it to a place on the desktop
where it will remain visible after you click on the image window.
(note- do not cover up the Tools window as you need to be able to select tools
in this activity)

4d) Choose one feature of Jupiter to focus upon.

5d) Magnify the feature you have chosen to at least 16:1.

6d) Select the coordinate tool and move around the feature you are studying.
Notice the changes that occur for the x and y values in the info table.

Determine what plane or axis the x values are in by moving the cross hair up and
down as well as side by side.
(note- the correct plane will be that plane where the x value changes in the
info window.

Determine what plane or axis the y values are in by moving the cross hair up and
down as well as side by side.
(note- the correct plane will be that plane where the y value changes in the
info window.

7d) Choose an array or grid within your studied feature that is 7 pixels by 7
pixels.

8d) On a separate piece of paper, draw your grid and fill in, clearly, each
square of the grid with that pixels three values; the x value, the y value and
the pixel value of luminosity or brightness. Also, write down what level of
magnification you used.

Hints Sheet
Date

Period

Team Names

Opponent Team name
Magnification Level = __ : __

x___ x___ x____ x____ x____ x____ x____
y___ y___ y____ y____ y____ y____ y____
v___ v___ v____ v____ v____ v____ v____

9d) Give your array and magnification values to another team and see if they
can find the feature your choose?

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ADVANCED IMAGING WORK
There is clearly some features that are only visible when images are viewed in
one wavelength or another (RGB).

Download the image file named "jupiterWS.tif". It helps if the
image is filtered with other than a Grayscale Look Up Table. Separate out
the three slices:Red, Green, Blue and notice the difference in what each
image reveals that is hidden in the other wavelengths. You can recombine the
three slices by using the 8 bit color to RGB stacks in the stacks menu.

jupiterWS.tif is a 1.8 meg file because it is a 24 bit (millions of colors)
image. This will take a long time to download under best conditions, so
start the download and make dinner.

This advanced enrichment activity is correlated with activity 3A in the
Teacher's Guide) go to the following URL address to get the file to your
computer.

http://passporttoknowledge.com/hst/scott/tiff/

Using your existing Mac skills, copy and paste into your favorite Works
program and your new imaging skills. Discuss, using example images, what
features are prominent, at what wave length and what you think is going
on meteorologically.

More advanced imaging is possible of course. You can use the Density
Slice tool to measure any range of pixel values you desire. To use the
tool, select it and use the LUT tool in the tool box to adjust the upper
and lower bounds of the slice you are analyzing. You can check the
upper and lower bounds by looking at the info window. You could for
instance calculate the percentage of belts (dark bands) and zones
(bright bands) are in association with the Great Red Spot.

Another famous imaging tool is the Surface Plot in the Analyze menu.
Try it, you will like it. This tool generates a surface plot of the pixel
values for any selected area or entire image.

Text version of lesson plan.
Index of Images used in Lesson.
Introduction to Electronic Field Trips