Change in the Appearance of Jupiter, South dark belt missing Options

[Hungry4info]

This is pretty amazing.
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/jupiter/index.live

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[Decepticon]

Ian R I like the comparison you did. I was thinking the same thing when I first saw the images.
The great red spot looks different.

[4th rock from th...]

...The great red spot looks different.

Let me add a Pioneer 11 image that I processed some time ago:




The GRS changes are apparent, but besides that the band structure around it is also quite different. Fascinating!

[elakdawalla]

Let me add a Pioneer 11 image that I processed some time ago:

That's really nice work -- can you explain a little more about how you did the processing?

[4th rock from th...]

Well, besides the normal processing techniques such as level adjustments, for the Pioneer images I redid the color composites by processed color and luminance separately.

So the processing steps would be something like this:

- Find and stack the best copies of the image to reduce noise, scan and print artifacts. Two good copies are enough to recover the original 6bit dynamic of the images.

- From the stacked master frame, I made two copies. One I change to B&W and process to bring out faint details. The other I use to create a color image as well balanced as possible. For that I mix the red and blue channels to recreate green (although this was already done on most of the original images). I may have to apply some with pass filters to get rid of color gradients.

- I recombine the luminance from the first version of the image with the color information from the second version, adjusting saturation, gamma and overall look using Cassini images as a visual reference.

- Finally, I warp the image to correct from the spin scan image distortion, using a simulated Jupiter disk with a similar view point that came from Celestia.

I think that final results are close to what the original data shows and only geometry is still somewhat off.