In the experiment summarized in the montage below, a freshly mowed green was chosen and a series of high-resolution pictures of the grass was taken along the pathway outlined in blue. The opensource package imagej and its plug-ins were used to analyze the photographs. As shown in the top table, the color intensity of the green varies along the path, as expected. The middle table shows how the dominant angle of the grass blades varies according to the color intensity of the stripe. Specifically, the grass in the light stripes is consistently more bent compared to grass in the adjoining dark stripes. In this experiment, we looked at a green planted in bent grass and mowed with a riding triplex mower. Will the same sort of results be obtained on a different day on a different green? What if a bermuda green is used instead? Or one that was walk-mowed? Is the roll of the golf ball influenced by striping? Stay tuned to find out.
