Yup. I've thought of Dione as Tethys on crack for a while, and Enceladus as..well, no need for mixed metaphors. Hopping over to community chitchat to start the Most Interesting/Most Boring thread.

No real disagreement there OWW... In terms of visual kick, Tethys rocks the party about as hard as a fistful of valium chased with a bottle of NyQuill™. Nonetheless, the linear troughs in the top middle frame and the differences in crater density across the three little windows here are intriuging. The right hand image looks down on part of the Ithaca Chasma system in exquisite detail, and there's nothing but ancientness to look at. I wonder what this mass of cliffs looked like when it formed.
Thanks for the compliments both...Emily, I was unfamilliar with Mr. Tufte's work, but we clearly share an affinity for the Century Gothic font.

Side note: I like how this illustrates the difference in FOV between the two cameras, and it makes me nostalgic for Galileo's tightly focused strips of images.

Now that we finally have the May 26 images to play with, I can share why I was chewing my toenails off waiting for them. This composite shows the context for the nested high resolution images obtained during the quasi-targeted flyby in September 2005. I've excluded the first pair from the series because the WAC frame is saturated and the corresponding NAC view is underexposed (not to mention they don't fit anywhere I can figure out.)

Wow! I stop staring at the toaster waiting for slices of Tethys to pop up and there they are.
Here's an attempt at an anaglyph of Herschel and a compilation of the clearest views of everyone's favorite Really Disporportionately Big Dent through the recent pass.

With complete trust in VP's veracity regarding the "missing" Mimas and Tethys images, a swift and merciless application of Occam's Razor is all that is necessary to answer our lingering questions. I trust that these will be leaked no further than these professional and competent pages.

Cassini, how could you? Two-timing with that battered old hag Rhea again (sob)! Where are your PRIORITIES in this relationship? If you don't straigten up, I'm leaving you for the Mars program!!!

Hope those images turn up eventually. In any case, I must comment that Rhea will come away from this mission with the most comprehensive surface coverage of any body in the system, probably due to location and circumstance. I'm liking the new Mimas images...that's a good view of the canyon east of Herschel, but I was hoping they'd be taken a bit closer.


...those data police better have riot gear...

Yeesh. My noise-to-signal ratio is rising with each post.

Exploitcorporations,
UMSF Spelling Bee Champion

I was wondering if that sounded goofy. I was thinking compilation in terms of an album...composted, confused, or cannibalized might be more appropriate.

Exploitcorporations,
Image Vulture

Emily's blog post is a marvelous alternate of the same concept, as is VP's in the NH at Io thread. I'm curious as to whether the colors in the MVIC product are too bold or on the mark (note the greenish tint of Io's nightside and the bright yellow of Europa in the official release)...I tend to go with muted in my color experiments as of late. John or VP, do you have any insights as to what the human eye would see in this scene?

Thought you might enjoy that one. If anyone is an advocate for snowmen, it's you.

I was wondering just when this connection would be made. Ustrax was right all along.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the names that will be applied to the lakes, seas, and islands of this region as mapping improves over the course of the extended mission(s). This is geography we can quickly identify with, and a treasure trove of terrestrial lake names are waiting to be attached to these features...will the seas be called "Mare"? What of the islands? "Facula" need not apply here.

-Droppin' bank in the swear jar, yo. Klink.

Unfortunately, the ones available on the web are all of the color-coded variety for the time being. I've attempted to round them up here for one stop shopping...even with the low resolutions they are very instructive. The depth of the "snowman" crater complex on Iapetus is impressive.




EDIT: Elevation scales on top center models corrected to +/- 5km

Seas map updated with approximate position and scale of newly released image from T30:

Alternate history:

The twister dumps Dorothy's house on the surface of Dione instead of Oz. She walks to the door with Toto in her arms. In addition to both of their lungs explosively decompressing in the near vacuum, the scene looks uninspiring in glorious color. Motion pictures remain in black and white for much of the remainder of the century.

The latest in the poster series includes global perspectives of Dione up through the late April pass. Note the very similar views in the upper right, taken 6 June and 2 August 2005 respectively. DEMs of this hemisphere have already been produced. Natural color images (last in top row and first in 2nd row) by ugordan.

Forty-three minutes. (ducks)




Ganymede transit with crescent brought out:

These stories are adorable...my four-year old says that I play with moons and make puzzles with them, but no names are known to him but Saturn's. Kudos to Ted for a magnificent montage and Bjorn for assembling some of the fugliest images in planetary exploration history into something vaguely comprehensible. I'm tossing in a context scene of the Memphis Facula mosaic from the first post...those Voyager images make things far easier to understand where available.

Hi Phil. All of those mosaics are in reduced-scale form at the flickr link at the bottom of my posts now...the site they had been linked to was deleted in my long absence last summer. I will eventually have those dead links connected to the flickr page, and hopefully get those images up there at full size once I scrape enough change out of my sofa to get a paid account.

Can't help but toss my hat in the ring with this obscure observation from the E12 orbit in December 1997. Galileo passed within 20,000km of Ganymede and took this hard-to-decipher oblique pan across the floor of the giant Gilgamesh basin. The fractures scale all the way down to the limit of resolution in the right-hand portion of the mosaic.

That's really a very evocative image, Craig. No need to apologize! As for the scaling in the comparison image, it's taken directly from PIA09184... important to remember the curvature over these surfaces are very different, but it gives a nice idea.

Scale comparison:

Expanded version of PIA08365:

EDIT: Moved