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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Sunday, August 23, 1998
"The lucky thing was that the wireless broke down early enough for us to fix it before the accident. We noticed something wrong on Sunday, and Phillips and I worked seven hours to find it. We found a ‘secretary’ burned out, at last, and repaired it just a few hours before the iceberg was struck."
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As Joseph Conrad said, "the sea has never been friendly to man." Or, for that matter, to technology. This morning, at 10:30 a.m., Polaris Imaging’s Paul Matthias and Nautile pilots Max DuBois and Yann Houard climbed into the sub and began their slow descent to the Titanic. Today, for the first time, they were going to begin digitally photographing the wreck site in order, ultimately, to create a high-resolution photomosaic of the Titanic’s bow and stern and the surrounding area.  To
prepare for this first digital imaging mission, the Polaris expedition team—Paul,
Charlie Burnham and Deuce DuBois—worked most of the night mounting
state-of-the-art equipment on the sub.The gear included two 1.5-million-pixel digital imaging cameras, two powerful strobes that each have the lighting power of a 600,000-watt bulb, and three laptop computers to store the digital images along with the exact navigational position of the sub when each photograph was taken. "Our goal for the rest of the expedition," Charlie explained, "is to take approximately 100,000 pictures, then mosaic them with a computer and end up with as complete a photographic map as possible of the Titanic’s wreck. For the first time, we’ll produce an image that’s large enough to enable people to see the entire site, yet high-resolution enough to clearly show individual details." |
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