No this is not faked! I put it together from a set of departure images. only about 10% or so involved use of a duplicate
image to fill a gap. It took a lot of heavy processing to suppress Neptune glare, which caused some of the spots to go oversaturated and some of the finer ring detail to wash out but its still a pretty pic. I dont think Triton was in the vicinity at the time, which would have been a real kicker.
I made this in 1993 and its been lurking in my digital files ever since. its a wonder it didnt "disappear" with all the OS and platform changes since then.
Wow! That's beautiful!!
I'm speechless.
<thunk!!!>
Wow! That's beautiful. How come we've never seen that before?! That should have been in every astronomy book written - and every Outreach talk I've given - since you made it!
Doctor...I just love when you emerge...
Awesome work Paul!
Wow!! I didn't have even the faintest idea the Voyager 2 dataset contained images making a mosaic like this one possible. Almost looks like a completely new planet to me ;-).
Beautiful! Brilliant processing. As someone who has looked at those images before, I can attest to how difficult they are to clean.
Very pretty Dr. Shank - like a second Saturn lurking in the outer solar system. Here's an example of the "original" imagery that I recall:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA02224.jpg
I think some of the ring arcs were missed as the left and right (unshown) sides were taken at different times. Guess we'll need a new mission to address that?
I am amazed too, Paul! Can you pls give us further detail on such picture (original images, filters and so on...)?
This is a very faive processing, done in order to remove some noise/dither and improve contrast. I slightly enhanced colors and, in fact, rings are reddish and planet blue!
I'm speechless too... AMAZING image
Wow. That's beautiful!
wow, looking at the noise in the orig's, what a piece of work, done in '93? That's ShamWow!
Got a question: Are Neptune's rings equatorial? Reason I ask is after looking at the image again it looks like one of the polar areas is sunlit & the other isn't, like Uranus. Neptune's axial tilt is around 28 deg, so I'm betting that this is a viewing geometry thing...but can't quite figure it out.
Yes they are pretty much equatorial, however, Joseph Burns has noted there is some inclination in the outer edge, apparently related to the effects of the inclined orbit of Triton.
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