Exquisite Saturn Images Options

[volcanopele]

Ian,

Why is the mosaic flipped?

[Ian R]

Don't stop, Ian!

--Emily

I'll try not to, Emily! In the meantime, a little extra Saturn for you:

Why is the mosaic flipped?

It's my fault, Jason - I forgot to correct it before saving the JPEG. Luckily, I still have the PNG backup.

Cheers,

Ian.

[Stu]

Great work Ian. You might be interested to know that in the past week I've showed your Saturn images to around 400 people as part of my "Outreach" work, including almost 300 kids, and they've all been thrilled by them. One woman at the talk I gave to a U3A group yesterday said the "from above" mosaic was 'a work of art'. So keep it up mate!

[Ian R]

Here's a sneak-peek of the mosaic in its current unfinished state:



And here's the same view from the Solar System simulator:



The finished image will show Prometheus, Pandora, Mimas, and at least one of the co-oribitals.

Ian.

[Ian R]

Great work Ian. You might be interested to know that in the past week I've showed your Saturn images to around 400 people as part of my "Outreach" work, including almost 300 kids, and they've all been thrilled by them. One woman at the talk I gave to a U3A group yesterday said the "from above" mosaic was 'a work of art'. So keep it up mate!

Thanks for the encouragement, Stu!

I have to say that it is incredibly satisfying to hear of the reaction that you got from those children - hopefully some of them will have been encouraged by your talk to delve more into the subject afterwards. Who knows - perhaps some of them could become future members of UMSF!

This Outreach work sounds really valuable, and who knows just how many people will become permanently interested in Astronomy due to your efforts.

Cheers,

Ian.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This thread is getting a bit off-topic because Saturn isn't a crescent in these images so I'm going to make it even more off-topic .

I just finished an animation showing Saturn as seen from Cassini throughout February 2007. The interval between frames is 20 minutes so Saturn rotates very fast (each rotation takes just over a second). The animation focuses on Saturn and the rings, satellites are omitted (the recent Titan flyby would be far too fast at 20 minutes between frames) and the starfield is fictional. However, the spacecraft trajectory is accurate and based on SPICE kernels. The field of view is 17 degrees.

The currently high inclination of Cassini's orbit becomes even more obvious by viewing animations like this one.

The animation can be downloaded here (warning: about 7 MB). It is encoded using DivX.

[Stu]

Thanks for the encouragement, Stu!

Ian.

Hey, thank YOU for the drool-worthy images! Keep 'em coming, 'cos I have lots more talks scheduled between now and the end of April - one every day, in fact, when National Science and Engineering Week is celebrated here in the UK next month.

I love doing the Outreach, it's very, very rewarding. I just wish (personal gripe alert) that NASA would let me become one of its Solar System Ambassadors, but that program STILL only operates in the US, so even tho I talk to several thousand people about astronomy and space exploration every year I don't qualify as an Ambassador. Which, I'll be honest, really hacks me off, if any of the Powers That Be are lurking out there...

[Floyd]

Whole new series of Saturn and rings images coming down at 5-8 wavelengths per view. Hope it is eventually a complete set. If so, Ian and other have their work cut out for them again.

Floyd

[Ant103]

Hi,

The last color mosaic taken by Cassini, I think, the 22-02-07 :


And a view of Titan :


I see lot of pictures from Ian R, he make a good work . Thanks!

[ugordan]

A nice image of the lit B ring disappearing behing Saturn's dark limb. Notice the brownish color of the rings as seen through the haze as well as striking refraction making the rings appear bent. Taken on March 6th from about 850 000 km and at a high phase angle.


The bending is even more prominent in an old, lower resolution image, taken at a low phase angle and also capturing Atlas emerging from behind Saturn:

In this one Saturn's limb appears pronouncedly blue, probably due to gas backscatter.

[Ant103]

And my owns :

[ugordan]

Here's a nice composite made of wide-angle frames I stumbled upon on the PDS while searching for something else. Funnily enough, the thumbnails and metadata for these appear on the online PDS search form, but the download links don't work. I had to dig trough the specific DVD volume to find the exact 3 frames. The same problem also affects the other Kodak moment I've been trying to find on the PDS for a while, the one featured in this release. Apparently there are still problems with the PDS as previously the latter set didn't even come up in my searches. I also found cases of what appear to be missing images on the DVD volumes, but I digress...



I didn't use my usual processing (which tries to mimic my VIMS experiments), but used CICLOPS team's approach. I used to think they did complex channel mixing to get true color but what they appear to be doing is simple channel composites and then modifiy the white point to something similar to D65. This makes white objects turn bluish, as can be seen in their recent composite (note Rhea's color). As you can see, this approach with no mixing gives much more vivid colors and the output is more bluish (naturally, due to the white point correction), unlike my composites which appear more "dullish" yellow with subtle hues, but retain the white whitepoint. One thing I noticed only afterwards is that the brightest part of the sunlit disk got a bit color saturated (my fault), but it's hardly noticeable. Compare the colors here to this official release. Funnily enough, there are traces of color saturation at the sunlit limb even in that image.

Still, this is a nice image and nicely shows just how oblate Saturn really is, it barely fits into the frame horizontally while vertically it fits comfortably. It's one of the RGB sets I'm wondering why they never got released officially, especially since color releases are pretty scarce.

Taken on 16th May 2005 from a distance of 2 million kilometers and at a phase angle of 49 degrees.

[pat]

..... The same problem also affects the other Kodak moment I've been trying to find on the PDS for a while, the one featured in this release. Apparently there are still problems with the PDS as previously the latter set didn't even come up in my searches. I also found cases of what appear to be missing images on the DVD volumes, but I digress...

The images you want are W1480697632_1.IMG, W1480697688_1.IMG & W1480697748_1.IMG from the observation NAV_00BSK_OPNAV372_PRIME. The reason you couldn't find them is because whoever wrote the blurb for the public release image screwed up and got the date wrong. These images were taken on 02 DEC 2004 NOT 14 DEC 2004. Which also means that the distance to Saturn is also wrong. It should be ~3,976,000 km. The images are on the PDS volume COISS 2008.

[ugordan]

Yep, I know where to find them, as I said the image overview page the search thumbnails link to works and contains valid data such as time, target, DVD volume, but the actual *.IMG file download link doesn't work, complains about a server error. I'm not sure, but I think some of these IMGs didn't even show up in PDS searches before so it might be something to look at.
I rarely search the PDS with dates from PR releases anyway, mostly it's by selecting Target Name from the Quick Search tab. I also found the Target List entry on the Adv/Product tab giving me errors every time I enter anything so it's pretty useless now. It would be great if it worked.

[pat]

Yep, I know where to find them, as I said the image overview page the search thumbnails link to works and contains valid data such as time, target, DVD volume, but the actual *.IMG file download link doesn't work, complains about a server error. I'm not sure, but I think some of these IMGs didn't even show up in PDS searches before so it might be something to look at.
I rarely search the PDS with dates from PR releases anyway, mostly it's by selecting Target Name from the Quick Search tab. I also found the Target List entry on the Adv/Product tab giving me errors every time I enter anything so it's pretty useless now. It would be great if it worked.

Yeah, I don't use the PDS tools to search for images etc. And I download the entire volumes when they become available and use my own software for searches etc -- actually come to think of it I don't use the PDS for anything but downloading the complete volumes. And of course you have to be careful when searching on the TARGET_NAME keyword -- for these images (and most if not all OPNAVS) the TARGET_NAME keyword is "SKY" not "SATURN" as you might expect from the public release blurb.