The Big One, My latest (and last for a while!) mosaic... Options

[Ian R]

I started working on the following mosaic on the 22nd of February, and just over 10 days later, it is finally completed. At times it was an extremely frustrating process indeed; however, as each tile fitted together and more of the finished composite was revealed, I grew ever more excited.

Now it is with a big sigh of relief that I can finally reveal Saturn as she presented herself to Cassini on the evening of the 20th of February, 2007:



I dedicate this image to all the great folks here on UMSF who have greatly enriched my enjoyment of space exploration.

Enjoy!

Ian.

[elakdawalla]

I went through the raw images yesterday and counted up a total of seven complete multispectral mosaics on the planet since the 19th. For those of you who want to take up Ian's work now that he's been driven mad by doing two of these, you could assemble the mosaics from: February 5 (unlit side, ring opening angle 30ish degrees); February 18 (lit side, ring opening angle in the high 50s, Saturn at roughly half phase), Feburary 19 (lit side, ring opening angle in the high 50s, Saturn at mostly full phase), or February 27-28 (unlit side, ring opening angle in the high 50s, Saturn in a crescent phase).

Some of the images are unfortunately marred by some stripy noisy data dropouts (like this one). I've heard that this is due to a bad sumbodule (one of 128) on one of the SSRs. It must have been hit by some extra-energetic cosmic ray and is corrupted. They're working on a flight software update that will automatically skip over this submodule, but it won't be uplinked for a couple of months, so we'll continue to see those from time to time.

--Emily