Monday, February 16, 2009

Image Capture of Satellite Collision

For my image capture assignment, I grabbed an image showing the predicted debris from the Feb 10 collision between an Iridium communication satellite and a defunct Russian weather satellite. We have been talking about this event in my Earth Science class lately and I could use this graphic to illustrate some salient points.
After I found a desired graphic on Explorer, I used the Print Screen button on my keyboard to grab the entire image on the monitor. (Note that if you use Alt+Print Screen, you just get an image of the Explorer window.) I then opened Word and pasted (Ctrl V) it to the blank Word document. This is just a storage point so I can regrab it if I mess up. Then I copied and pasted the image to MS Paint. There I used the selection tool to crop just the part of the image I wanted (just the graphic, excluding the windows and Explorer stuff around the edges). I copied and pasted that to a new Paint document. From here I used the paintbrush, eyedropper, pencil, and text tools to modify the graphic for class. Note that the text tool is extremely crude; I had to magnify the text and use pencil tool to clean up the text pixel by pixel. I finally decided that it would be better to use the pencil to write the text I wanted. I used some of the graphic tools to add a crude image of the Moon and labeled it.

The file is a 797 kB bitmap image, that is 597x455 pixels in physcial size. It is a MS Paint file.
Or you can use the GDocs address below.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d6j5vqr_15hbdrbzgw

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