Exquisite Saturn Images Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Beautiful work. The ring shadows are getting really narrow and the now faintly bluish color in the northern hemisphere will soon be completely gone.

[Ian R]

Thanks Bjorn.

Yes, the northern hemisphere is really displaying a varied selection of pale blues and greens at the moment. Also, it won't be long before the south pole completely disappears into the darkness of winter:

[Ian R]

Here's another two-frame mosaic:

[Ian R]

I couldn't resist doing this mosaic either; there's some rather picturesque storms in the southern hemisphere:

[Ian R]

This view from the south has the C-ring visible in silhouette, and a moon shadow (although I don't know of which moon):



Edit: Looks like the mystery moon is Tethys.

[ugordan]

Again, good stuff, Ian! These will be great once the data hits PDS. I might as well show a mosaic done in a similar vein, showing the long-lived storm captured on March 4, 2008 in calibrated color:



It's been sharpened a bit to enhance cloud features and rotated so north is roughly up.

[bdunford]

Wow, a nice one from the raws:

[imipak]

I try not to post when I've nothing more to contribute than "wow!"; I'll make an exception in this case. That is stunning - like a minimalist companion to the classic Eagle Nebula HST image.

[Ian R]

That's a wonderful mosaic Gordan - what method did you use to sharpen the image? It's worth comparing to this excellent amateur image that was taken at around the same time:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanallens/3138962663/

I must learn how to calibrate the PDS imagery one day... at the moment, I just enjoy the 'hot off the press' feeling of putting together a colour view from the raws that were taken only a couple of days previously.

Ian.

[mchan]

I try not to post when I've nothing more to contribute than "wow!"

Ditto, as I push jaw back in place.

(edited)

The moon (Prometheus?) and shadow give a 3-D quality. It is beautiful, eerie, and seemingly unreal. It brings the feeling I got watching the last part of 2001 A Space Odyssey years ago.

[nprev]

Good Lord...

That's one of the few pictures you see that make you realize that you really are living in the 21st Century, seeing sights only dreamed of before, flying cars be damned! Stunning beauty that touches the soul, is all.

[ugordan]

Ian, I use a basic unsharp filter when trying to enhance small scale features such as clouds. Usually I set the filter radius between 3-5 pixels.

As for calibration, it's not rocket science - Bjorn's IMG2PNG tool can do that for you. All you need is the calibration DVD volume, some 600 megabytes IIRC.

[Ian R]

Here's a little preview of one side of a full-globe mosaic that's on the RAW page at the moment:

[Ian R]

Well, I finally finished the full-globe mosaic - I'm not 100% happy with it, but I suppose there's only so much you can do with the raw JPEGs. Hopefully, this has more realistic colour than my previous efforts:

[tedstryk]

Bravo! That is an incredibly beautiful image!