Io Blog Options

[PFK]

, but benzene thiol will stink quite nicely - enough to clear a lab.

Agreed, one of the worst - and not only is it bad, I find it comes back to haunt you. Later that day, I find any other smell, even nice ones, just manifest themselves as its reappearance. Trouble is, its quite useful for us.
Bis(trimethylsilyl)sulfide is an interesting one as its pretty volatile and smells exactly like natural gas. I know sulfur additives are put in the latter, but something about this one just gets people reporting gas leaks. "Best" one we had was when I was at Imperial and an undergraduate project student vented 10s of g up and out of the fume cupboard and the gas people got called out not only locally, but in Bayswater - which if you know your London is on the other side of Hyde Park!
Drop down the chalcogens to get the real swines though - organo selenium and tellurium stuff leaves the lab with a characteristic "presence", not helped by the fact that if the people working in it have taken it onboard then they leach it out as Me2Se etc, which makes them smell like they've just done a 24hr shift in a garlic factory I remember getting some byproduct of an organo selenocyanate reaction down my shirt and having to hang it on the washing line for two weeks to fumigate before I even dared hand wash it!
More pertinently, does any chemistry of the latter heavier elements manifest itself on Io or elsewhere? I seem to recall some notion that there were tellurium deposits on Venus, but I don't know whether that notion is still in fashion?
Another question that is directly relevant to what we do research-wise comes with the interaction of sulfur with nitrogen. I've worked with sulfur nitrides for decades (and happily still have a full compliment of fingers despite S4N4, S5N6 etc being significantly explosive) and non are naturally occuring on earth (though I'm sure some form during volcanic events etc, but they are not stable enough to end up appearing in geological samples). But I do know of a report of spectroscopic identification of the simplest one, NS, in a comet's make up. The low temperature will stabilise it no doubt, but it will be reactive and the latter fact could manifest itself in significant addition to the overall chemistry going on in low temperature sulfur/nitrogen rich environments. But I wonder if any other evidence for such species in environments such as Io has been gathered - I'd be fascinated to know.

[stevesliva]

I remember getting some byproduct of an organo selenocyanate reaction down my shirt and having to hang it on the washing line for two weeks to fumigate before I even dared hand wash it!

This must be what my dog likes to roll in when I take her hiking.

[volcanopele]

Starting late last month, I began a feature on this blog where I highlight one Ionian volcano each week. I just wanted to let you all know about the most recent two, Hi'iaka (from last week) and Culann (from 30 minutes ago). I wanted to call your attention to the latter in particular, for processing I've done this evening of the Galileo I25 color observation of Culann Patera:


Cleaned up amazingly well. Posted a couple more versions up on the blog.

[ugordan]

What do you think of the color here:



Processed as before, but instead of leaving it in gamma-correct representation, I converted it to Lab color and applied a gamma of 0.45 there. Effectively returning the contrast level to the non-gamma-correct representation, but retaining the display-correct color (and to a lesser degree saturation). Sort of a best of both worlds version. Seems to work well for these localized features, not so much for global views.

[JohnVV]

without the lines from the missing data
[attachment=22398:inpaint.jpg]
gmic 25ISCULANN01.m.png 25ISCULANN01.png -inpaint_flow 100 -o inpaint.png

[lyford]

These are beautiful! Why should the Hubble get all glory when it comes to pretty space pictures? This could appropriately hang next to Rothko or Motherwell in a gallery....

[volcanopele]

This week's volcano of the week was Tvashtar. So much has been written about that volcanic region, so many cool eruptions have occurred there, and so many great images (<- like my avatar), that it required three rather longish posts. I hope you guys get a chance to check them out. Informative and at least my section titles are amusing (at least to me, maybe only Seinfeld fans will get some of them...):

Tvashtar Part one - Part Two - Part Three


Very nice Culann renditions! I am always a bit cautious with how much interpolation I do to correct missing lines. For complex scenes like Culann or the Bulicame Regio mosaic I talked about on the blog this weekend, it can often look...not right if I interpolate a data dropout more than one line thick.

[JohnVV]

"cleaning" up missing data .. to clean or not to clean , that is the question...

in my opinion it depends on what one is going to do with the data
for a scientific paper -- none .( or single missing lines )
or to impress the general public ( just look at the mer raw pan cam to the very nicely cleaned up and colorized - in a different thread )
data vs WOW factor

"it can often looking...not right"
it is very easy to do a bad inpainting job
and there is the time VS quality factor, often it will take way more time that it is worth .

[Littlebit]

...Just a quick note to thank Volcanopele for the rich article in Emily's blog.

First class, Jason

[PFK]

Little hands on experiment today to show the colour of quenched sulfur vapour (it's the central tube, right in the middle of the pic that's key here); so this is carefully dried sulfur (which is wetter than you'd think when it comes out of the bottle) flash heated under vacuum onto a liquid nitrogen cooled finger. The red/orange colour will presumably be indicative of a mix of S3, S4 and others - and comparisons with the pictures of Io's surface posted above are interesting re the colour. Note also a blue/violet tinge higher up...maybe indicative of S2? Certainly it's supposed to be that colour in the gas phase...
Apologies for the poor focus, but it's taken through two layers of glass, the outermost of which was rather warm!

[JohnVV]

nice pic but a small problem ( or very big if one has worked in the photographic darkrooms since 1985)
the over head florescent light - it is yellow-green and is missing some of the daylight spectra
-- look at the back wall , it is yellow / green --
a closer white balanced might be this
[attachment=24999:sulfvapo...ebalance.png]

there is still too much yellow but seeing as the blue is missing from the over head florescent light , not much more can be done
there is a reflection on the test tube of a window - it is close to #CCCCCC just a bit off

PS. yes it is a bad habit and a side affect of the trade
I can NOT look at peoples photos and NOT see what is wrong in the photoprocessing

and do not even get me started on the "family album "

[PFK]

Wish I hadn't bothered now
Seriously though it was but an exercise in curiosity rather than accuracy - just finished writing the sulfur chapter for the new edition of Comprehensive Inorganic Chemistry and so was intrigued to see if you could trap these out and visualise them. Obviously plenty of people in the research area will have seen them during matrix studies, but it's not obvious that they've actually shown colour images (even approximate ones) before, though I'll happily (really!) be proved wrong.
If the EPSRC want to fund me to accurately capture simulated planetary surfaces they're more than welcome, but it'll cost them a years PDRA and the dreaded Full Economic Costing
Anyhow, the colour will be a function of precise temperature and so rather than the blunt force of liquid nitrogen we'd have to more subtely match the surface temperature of Io or wherever. Do-able, but not as a cheap and cheerful exercise over a lunch break.
Interestingly in writing about the element, the role of such smaller allotropes in planetary science came to the fore even though it's light years away from my expertise. To a large extent this reflects the fact that it's been a vibrant area (and in the context of sorting out the structure of S4) over the last decade - which is good because anyone updating the story of sulfur comes up with the difficult task of funding stuff not covered in Steudel's astonishingly thorough 2 volume effort from 2003 (recommended for anyone who needs to know about the element in detail).

PS Added in edit: we can actually get an idea of true colour by looking at the vacuum tubing on the left. This is well known to anyone in a lab - and in truth is somewhere in between the two versions. That said. to the naked eye the quenched sample did actually even more red than the photo suggests - really quite striking when it appeared.

[climber]

On last issue of "Ciel & Espace" there is an interview of Irina Golodnikova called "At least, a map of IO".
Done by the ICA, I've found the link pointing to the a .PDF version of what she's talking about: http://icaci.org/documents/ICC_proceedings...nonref/26_4.pdf