Exquisite rings Options

[Juramike]

Saturn ring composite from PDS data:

[Bjorn Jonsson]

As usual, on January 1 a few thousand Cassini images were released by the PDS. This release is in my opinion not quite as spectacular as these releases have frequently been but even so, there are some great ring observation sequences.

Some of the more interesting observations are hi-res movies of the F ring, including a 90 frame time lapse movie. The resulting animated GIF is too big to upload it here but can be seen at the Planetary Society website:

http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-...-in-motion.html

This animation is a 90 frame time lapse movie from rev 181 obtained on February 13, 2013 at a range of ~650,000 km. This is a high-phase observation. It starts at 14:14:15 and ends at 19:24:12. The interval between individual frames is 3:30 minutes. The images have been calibrated and their gamma adjusted to make the fainter parts of the ring more visible. Some of the more obvious cosmic ray hits have been cleaned up.

The images resulting from processing the PDS images are often more 'clean' than images from the raw JPGs (no compression artifacts or problems due to an automatic contrast stretch). I will be posting more from this Cassini release in the coming days.