Rhea Revisited, Mosaics from the 30 August 2007 Encounter Options

[ugordan]

I know I said I wouldn't be doing the color mosaic soon, but seeing EC's great version made me try it myself after all. Here it is in false colors (though I fiddled with color balance so it's false false color) and with Saturn removed (8.5 megabytes):



Also, color (but contrast stretched) view of the "splat" crater:


And I might as well throw in an old Kodak moment of a sort, from the November 2005 flyby:

[tedstryk]

Beautiful! But since a double negative equals a positive, doesn't that mean it's true color?

[Exploitcorporati...]

*&%#$@in' amazing, Gordan! You have no idea how many times I've premptively edited posts (or avoided making them altogether) to avoid the expletive-induced banhammer on account of your work. I did a preliminary overlay of your color product with my fake Saturn backdrop (derived from your WAC composite from the same flyby) and the western dark sliver of the mosaic from my attempt, and the alignment is decent. Mind if I post the hybrid in a few days?

That equatorial band looks prominent and very real in stretching this image.

[ugordan]

You're too kind, EC. By all means go ahead with combining the two views, I'm eager to see how that turns out!

I agree the equatorial "band" (dark patch string might be a better term actually) can be seen stretching quite a long way across the disc. Very interesting. It's virtually invisible in a RGB view showing the same hemisphere, but at lower phase angle taken in November 2005: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3179/281438...25ee27152_o.jpg .
Photoshop's rescaling algorithms leave a lot to be desired, the top left mosaic footprint is noticeably blurred compared to others as any, even the least bit of scaling further blurs the image. That particular footprint for example was scaled twice (alignment issues), unlike others which were scaled just one time.