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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Titan _ Rev 164: Titan Monitoring Campaign

Posted by: titanicrivers Apr 15 2012, 10:33 PM

Some Titan images from the Rev 164 TMC sequence of April 8 from 1.8M km. RGB composite fading to a CL1 CB3 image reveals details of the upper atmosphere and surface centered on the Belet region. Images rotated so N is up.

Posted by: brellis Apr 16 2012, 02:50 AM

Great sequence - easy to see why Mr. Lorenz titled his wonderful book "Titan Unveiled"

Posted by: titanicrivers Apr 18 2012, 02:47 AM

Lots of upper atmosphere banding visible on the short wavelength (CL1 UV3) filtered image of Titan taken April 8th. Both North (NP) and South (SP) poles are now banded, the south showing complex upper haze changes and ? atmospheric waves as well. Raw image is contrasted and sharpened to bring out banding.

Posted by: titanicrivers Apr 27 2012, 05:23 AM

CL1 UV3 views of Titan from April 8 and April 23 are blink compared below. The banding high in the atmosphere shows no striking changes in these images from about 1.8M km. Slight changes reflect spacecraft movement, Titan rotation, sun angle to camera and imaging processing differences I would think.

Posted by: volcanopele Apr 27 2012, 05:50 AM

Interesting comparison. Yeah, a lot of the faint banding and swirls are lost due to compression artifacts introduced in these jpegs. I should point out that the April 23 observation actually had a pair of UV3 images because we had the data volume and time to do two time steps with that TMC, but for whatever reason, only one showed up on the JPL raw images page. Just something to look forward to in case we don't do a release about Titan hazes in the mean time before the PDS release.

Posted by: titanicrivers Apr 27 2012, 07:38 AM

Thanks VP. The southern haze layers in the BL and UV3 are fascinating; the April 20 images provide a nice composite view.

Posted by: titanicrivers May 1 2012, 07:59 AM

The second CL1 UV3 image VP mentions above now is in the raw images. Difference blending the two (on the left below) shows essentially no change other than slight apparent diameter difference due to Titan-spacecraft distance difference.
More interesting is the difference blending of the BL1 CL2 (blue light filter) with the UV filtered image (right image below) the latter showing details in a higher haze layer compared to the blue filter. These two images were from the same Titan spacecraft distance. Some artifact related to original image brightness may be present.