Uranus System Imaging Options

[machi]

I finished my first good image of Uranus.
Planet is colorized from three filtered images (orange, green, blue).
Slightly brownish color of rings is entirely artificial.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Today is the Voyager 2 Uranus 30 year flyby anniversary. Below are my recently reprocessed versions of the highest resolution Voyager 2 images of Titania and Oberon. They are from an unfinished image processing project I'm working on (Miranda, Ariel and Umbriel are unfinished and I might add color versions of Titania and Oberon).

First is Titania. The upper image is rendered from a sharpened stack of three polar maps. One additional image is available but it is too blurred to be useful for stacking. The original images were obtained on January 24, 1986 around 09:11 at a range of ~500,000 km.

The second one is from a stack of two maps. The original images were obtained on January 24, 1986 around 14:17 at a range of ~370,000 km.





The upper image is probably the sharpest version I have seen of these images. The lower one is comparable to Ted's version - interestingly parts of my version look slightly sharper than Ted's image whereas other parts look slightly sharper in Ted's version. I made no attempt to show Uranusshine on the nightside; Ted has done this at least as well as I could do.

And here's Oberon. This is from a sharpened stack of two polar maps. I could have used two additional images but they are fuzzy and would probably have degraded the final result. The original images were obtained at a range of ~665,000 km on January 24, 1986 around 08:50.



All of these images are enlarged relative to the original images. North is to the right (and slightly down) in all of the images. These images are not exactly detailed and really show the need for a new visit to the Uranus system. In a sense these bodies represent a 'transition' from Saturn's icy satellites to bodies like Pluto and Charon, all of which after the successful New Horizons flyby are far better explored than Uranus' satellites.