Dawn's first orbit, including RC3, March 6, 2015- June 15, 2015 Options

[Webscientist]

The linear arrangement almost has the look of the "Voyager Mountains" on Iapetus...

Well found for the analogy Scalbers!

I've extracted a portion of the Voyager Moutains and the bright patch of Iapetus, about 5 km long, looks like the bright spot of Ceres... to a certain extent!

Attached image(s)

 

[Gladstoner]

The brightest subspot (lower in my animation) perhaps also consists of two sub-subspots, the lower of which appears first and the upper which brightens. As others have pointed out, these sorts of brightness variations could be simply due to variable geometry of exposed surfaces/shadowing.

[attachment=35550:PIA19064...2x_gamma.gif]

That animation really helps.

I'm seeing (imagining) something along these lines:



The main bright area seems to be in the western part of a little depression of some kind, with the brightest material not becoming visible until the shadow clears the slope.

(Nothing in the drawing is necessarily to scale; plus, I intentionally left out the other bright spot(s).)

[elakdawalla]

Here's a slightly different take on this sequence of images. (Click to enlarge)

[Ken2]

A heavily zoomed and exposure enhanced version of the first 3 frames of the bright spot. (this may have introduced artifacts - but overall it allows a better overall visualization IMHO)

I think the these frames clearly show the outline of a crater with the far wall getting the first bit of sunlight. As the sun rises in the crater the crater gets more and more illuminated causing pixel saturation and bleed for the subsequent not shown images, but roughly corresponding to the crater dimensions.

[click to animate the GIF]

[ZLD]

Is there any speculation on what would be able to leave such a smooth, shiny depression? To me, it appears that much of the crater may be a similar make up because as the sun angle decreases, the crater continues to light up. Seems to be smack dab in the middle as well. Possibly a remnant of some cryo-gyser sort of blow out maybe?

[JohnVV]

well as of the 19th
the Dawn spacecraft would have gotten a good view of the area


and today the 21st

[Gerald]

...So someone could usefully do a poor-man's superresolution by enlarging (say 4x), rotating, and then stacking the images...

PIA19064, 4x magnified (probably bicubic), then polar-projected (bilinear interpolated) to 2880x2880 pixels, then cropped and registered, then pairwise averaged (stacked), sharpened, forth/back animated:

[Gladstoner]

Is anyone else having issues with the released animated GIF not repeating/looping?

( http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/Ceres_bright...k_into_view.asp )

[Gerald]

Yes, with (outdated) Windows XP / Chrome, at least.

[PaulH51]

Yes, with (outdated) Windows XP / Chrome, at least.

Also the same with W7 / Chrome

[JohnVV]

it is a setting ON!!! the dawn web site !

THEY!!! have the gif set to "run once"

[nprev]

Yeah, must be. I had to clear my cache to get it to run again. Hopefully this will be noticed and corrected soon; meanwhile, let's all be patient.

[fredk]

Works fine (even on ancient xp) if you download the gif and play in, eg, irfanview.

[elakdawalla]

I edited it to loop forever (click to enlarge):

[Mr Valiant]

Emily, great input. Like everyone here, hanging out for the hi resolution pics.
Anxiety level akin to Huygens.
We may actually be seeing a steady `volcanic eruption`.