Cassini image database & updates, And notifications of PDS data releases Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I have noticed that the January 1, 2007 Cassini PDS release is already available, see http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassi...assini_orbiter/

I haven't downloaded all of the imaging data and I'm just beginning to digest what I already have but there are some beautiful images of Enceladus' plumes and satellite mutual events, images of the G and D rings and interesting images of Saturn's nightside and fairly good Iapetus images.

Radar and VIMS is also available.

All in all a nice 'Christmas gift' .

[elakdawalla]

Thanks. For the Photojournal images, I just searched on Dione, and then I matched the dates and, when date was ambiguous (or, in one case, incorrect), I matched the phase angles and distances. A bit tedious but that's one thing I've been very curious about -- just how many of the "good" images have been released to the public in one way or another? It's not a bad proportion, it turns out, but it's not all of them by any means, and there is a LOT that can be done that hasn't yet been done with color data.

The 16-bit images do have a variety of brightnesses, but I did use IMG2PNG with the "-r" switch and all the Cassini calibration data to calibrate them as I did the format conversion. Clear and green filter images do seem to be pretty reasonable in their brightness, UV ones are pretty dark -- which is more or less what I expect, actually. Remember that Dione is somewhat dark as icy satellites go. Maybe Bjorn can comment on whether the full-size images look like they are supposed to, especially in the UV. I did get errors on every WAC image upon conversion though, so I'm not sure that those are properly calibrated. Of the 900 or so NAC images, IMG2PNG reported errors during the calibration step for about 20 of them.

On the next go-round I'll do Enceladus and we can see how different those look.

--Emily