HST Albedo Map Processing Options

[JRehling]

That's all fair and well; making the process more mature, one would define the parameters distinguishing one situation from another. e.g., Mercury at high phase angle, Mars at high phase angle, Iapetus at high phase angle, Mercury at low phase angle, etc. (Certainly, resolution is another important determiner of context: Rough at one resolution is smooth at another.)

Then, for any given image, you could say, here's a P% increase in resolution assuming a [KNOWN WORLD]-like surface at this phase angle, and whatever one sees or doesn't see, the prediction is appropriately contextualized. If the assumption is correct, the prediction should be correct. If we know that the assumption is questionable, then we know that the prediction is questionable.

[Guest_alex_k_*]

Also, finally got around to looking through the paper. If I am understanding correctly, the very orange image is based on a 6x1 pixel image and then stretched out.

I understand it's an estimation - i.e. if to downsample the "ground thruth" image to 6x1 they will be comparable. And I think the authors underestimated the resulted image, because it has frequency structure that allowed to perform the extrapolation.

I could see their method being pretty useful in observing exoplanets if the resolution can hit a few pixels across.

Yes, I think the method should be very promising for approximate mapping of exoplanets, Kuiper belt objects, etc. I'm sure it can be modified not only for 1 pixel observation but for 2x2 and any other resolution available from HST for the object. Having quality models and adequate algorithms it's possible to extract rich information even from several pixels.

upd: Most probably, original resolution of the "orange" image was 60x30 px.