Exquisite Saturn Images Options

[ugordan]

I've assembled the short Titan transit sequence into an animation and colorized it based on previous composites. I used 16 CB2 filter frames which show cloud structure better than the human eye would see so it's not exactly natural color looking. Being an infrared filter, it also shows hints of Titan's surface drowned in jpeg artifacts. I've filled out missing data, mostly Dione being out of frame.

Below is a full-res quicktime animation and 2/3 resolution animated gif - I recommend Quicktime, much smaller file and not grainy as the gif.


 CB2_colorized.mov ( 263.82K ) Number of downloads: 1052

[elakdawalla]

Wow -- that's really lovely! Nice work!!

--Emily

[Ant103]

I agree Very good work
Dances into space... Stu could made some poetry with it

PS : how do you proceed to align moons layers (I tried, but it's a litttle long because between two R and B layers, they have moved)?

[tedstryk]

WOW! That is incredible!

[ugordan]

PS : how do you proceed to align moons layers (I tried, but it's a litttle long because between two R and B layers, they have moved)?

There was no aligning involved here, the frames are all monochrome infrared filter colorized by overlying color from previous RGB composites of Saturn and Titan. To make it perfectly clear, the color seen here is *fake*. Nonetheless, I believe the real color (if there had been any real RGB shots taken) would look similar to this, barring the enhanced cloud structure and Titan's surface.
Additionally, gapfill was applied to the right edge where Dione was occasionally clipped out as well as Titan in a couple of shots by interpolating the moon positions.

In case of regular RGB shots where the moons move between exposures, I simply cut out the 2 channels and usually align on the middle one.

[Exploitcorporati...]

Those really are stunning! I'm going to need to install some kinda retraction mechanism to reel my eyeballs back into my skull every time someone posts in this thread. Thanks, Gordan...you just hijacked my desktop for oh, like the 17th time this year.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Absolutely beautiful, possibly the best Cassini imagery animation I've seen.

Regarding the aligning of satellites mentioned above a simple trick (that might be considered 'cheating') is to align the satellites (or in some cases satellite shadows) separately from other parts of the scene. This gets rid of color fringes and other ugly artifacts (see e.g. this message/image).

[ugordan]

A two-footprint wide-angle mosaic:


Sadly, the left footprint lacks a blue channel so I fudged with a synthetic blue. It turned out fairly okay in the end, not very noticeable.
Sadly #2, Saturn's north is clipped off.

EDIT: I updated the composite above; very slightly tweaked the green channel, it looked a bit too green before. I also cleaned up two hot pixels that somehow escaped me the first time.

This post has been edited by ugordan: Sep 6 2007, 02:40 PM

[CAP-Team]

Nice work! Pity it isn't a crescent

[ugordan]

Pity it isn't a crescent

Yes. Difficult times we live in!

[tedstryk]

WOW

[dvandorn]

Sadly #2, Saturn's north is clipped off.

Sadly, as well, the outer edges of the ring ansas are also clipped off. That said, it's still an extraordinary image. Thanks!

-the other Doug

[Ian R]

<robin>
Holy image processing, Batman!
</robin>

That's an awesome image Gordan. You da man.

Ian.

[ugordan]

Since nobody appears to have picked up on this, here's another Kodak moment with Enceladus:


And while I'm at it, here's an old one that was missing a blue frame for a long time - Enceladus, Mimas and Prometheus/Atlas(?, the speck below Enceladus):


BTW, I also slightly updated the composite in my previous post - the color didn't look quite right before.

[ugordan]

Another wide-angle:


Mimas, Pan and the rings:


This post has been edited by ugordan: Sep 8 2007, 11:03 AM