Voyager mosaics and images of Jupiter, A fresh look at some ancient stuff Options

[Ian R]

Bjorn, I neglected to congratulate you on an absolutely staggering mosaic -- this is a sure-fire contender for APOD, if ever I saw one!

[Bjorn Jonsson]

A new, big mosaic of Voyager 1 images, this time showing the Great Red Spot at high resolution. The first version has normal brightness and contrast and its overall color should be fairly accurate. Small scale features have been sharpened a bit. In the second one the contrast and sharpness have been greatly exaggerated:





This is a 4x3 mosaic of images. The processing is almost identical to the processing described in the first message of this thread so I'm not decribing it further here. One caveat though: There is probably some slight geometric distortion but it shouldn't be a problem in this case.

The images I used were obtained on March 4,1979 at a distance of about 1.85 million km. The first image (C1635314.IMQ) was obtained at 07:08:36 and the last one (C1635400.IMQ) at 07:45:24. The resolution is roughly 18 km/pixel.

Mosaics of some of these images have appeared before as 'official' image releases but interestingly, only 3x2 images were used in all cases. The offical mosaic can be seen at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00022 . There is a false color version (lots of blue color) that is better known: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/...t-103317-sw.jpg

My new mosaic reveals an enormous amount of details, especially in the sharpened version. Some of these details I didn't know were visible in any images of Jupiter until relatively recently. The sunlight is coming form the east (right) and because the GRS is in the southern hemisphere it's really coming roughly from the ENE over the GRS and the regions south of it. With this in mind, vertical relief and cloud shadows are clearly visible at many locations around the GRS' periphery. A particularly good example can be seen near (2350,1600) and to the northeast of this location. There is another example near (2480,1080). The wind speeds are especially high there as the elongated appearance of these clouds may suggest. More examples can be seen near (600,980) and (370,920) and (540,1600) and possibly (925,550). These clouds have changed the appearance I imagine Jupiter would have from low altitude (1000 km or something like that). There are also some interesting clouds at (2270,605) and further east.

This is the highest resolution color mosaic completely covering the GRS that I have ever seen. Galileo didn't obtain GRS mosaics at this resolution and Cassini passed too far away from Jupiter. This image looks sufficiently different (and better!) from the old, official versions that in a way I feel like I'm processing stuff from a new planetary encounter when I see this. We will probably not be seeing anything comparable to this until EJSM (or some future spacecraft) starts orbiting Jupiter. Hopefully it will be carrying a camera capable of obtaining even higher resolution images than this from the distances it typically images Jupiter at high resolution.

Interestingly, the orange and violet images I used here were followed by a green filtered GRS mosaic ~40 minutes later. However, I couldn't used these instead of synthetic green because some of the clouds (especially in the GRS' northeast periphery) move so fast that the three color channels couldn't be properly aligned if I used the green images.

[elakdawalla]

Wow.

[ElkGroveDan]

Oh my.

[Hungry4info]

Goodness O_o.

[nprev]

[Juramike]

Whoa! The detail in that is A M A Z I N G ! ! !

Beautiful!

[Stu]

That's outrageously brilliant, Bjorn. That image deserves to be in astronomy textbooks for years to come.

[Explorer1]

Holy.... holy!

And I thought the Jupiter mosaic from Cassini post-flyby was good! (I cut it out of a calendar and hung it on my wall)

[Phil Stooke]

Brilliant work!

Phil

[ilbasso]

One gets the impression of a "wall of clouds" to the west of the GRS - it appears almost like one is looking down several hundred miles through an upper cloud deck and that the GRS is far below. This may entirely be an optical illusion, but with my screen completely filled with the image, it's hard for me not to see it that way!

Congratulations!

Jonathan

[jasedm]

To echo comments above, this is astonishingly good. bravo Bjorn!!

[eoincampbell]

Beautiful quality of detail. Congratulations!
My wife teaches 5th Grade and echoes Stu's textbook idea!

[Ian R]

Good gravy! I now officially have Jupiter-envy...

[DrShank]

beauty! would you call this close to natural color now?

the voyager cameras were quite good for the time and Ive gotten lots of mileage out of the images. the big difference was the lack of infrared capability, which allows you to look deeper into the atmosphere and see thermal updrafts and hot lavas (on io that is).