Saturn's Rings To Shine As Never Before Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=94157

Interesting view of the F Ring with two Moons either side.

[nprev]

Possibly three moons...isn't the Keeler gap satellite also visible at about 8 o'clock with respect to the image center (can't recall its name)?

[ugordan]

Those sure don't look like Prometheus and Pandora, even if one takes into account they'd probably be thin crescents at this phase. These dots look way too small, my guess is cosmic ray hits. As for the third dot being Daphnis, I'd be more inclined to think that if we'd see waves on the ring edges. This also looks like ordinary camera noise conveniently placed in the Keeler gap.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Emily has a very interesting blog entry today, which refers to Jones et al. [2006] published in Geophysical Research Letters back in November.

EDIT: News@nature.com also had a story on this.

This post has been edited by AlexBlackwell: Dec 27 2006, 07:42 PM

[dilo]

Those sure don't look like Prometheus and Pandora...

This is a movie of 26 frames centered on this one:

Prometheus is barely visible in the first frame (N00073840):

[nprev]

New high-res ring images down. This one is particularly interesting; there's an apparent spoke area about midway left & down of center, plus some pronounced kinks in some of the subrings...finally some subscale moonlet evidence?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...7/N00075523.jpg

[ugordan]

Be careful with that image. It's part of a dozen-frame ring scan and several frames got very stretched due to low contrast. Comparing this frame to neighbouring ones, this one was also severely stretched, in reality the contrast is nowhere as high as you can be led to believe. As a consequence that dust ring on the right is pronouncedly visible and also a light splat (which you identified as a spoke) that can also be visible in Titan raw images at about the same location. Usually, when you can see that dust ring very clearly it implies heavy histogram stretching and then flatfield effects and noise comes into play.

EDIT: On second look, nevermind that, I see this is a different sequence and the brighter splotch actually moves in subsequent frames. That's most likely a spoke, nprev. Good catch!

[nprev]

You're right, UG, and thanks for the reality check...raw imagery has its bear-traps for the unwary! Looks like I got lucky, is all...

Meanwhile, here's an interesting example of dynamic activity in the F-ring. What's really fascinating here (at least to me) is the possibility that rather than being disassociated this material might actually be in the process of being accreted into a discrete object...the causal arrow, if you will, is not obvious (although entropy does argue for dissolution). Still, seems like there might be a lot of lessons to be learned with respect to things like planet formation here.

[ugordan]

I've been messing around with the Sep 15, 2006 backlit sequence from the PDS. While there are numerous wide-angle frames that are taken at half resolution, there's only one RGB set taken at full 1024x1024 resolution and that's of Saturn itself:
.
Vertical charge bleed in the red channel was so big I had to cheat a bit to remove it and make it less ugly.

Also, since the CICLOPS backlit mosaic image advisory states the color was generated from UV, clear and IR frames (there are no complete mosaic coverage RGB sets available, only the left ring ansa region and it's pretty overexposed), here's what actual RGB color gives, these were taken with 2x binning, it's a quick 4 footprint mosaic (incomplete, there's a bit of additional E ring coverage available I omitted):

The bright dot is, of course, Earth.

Finally, a colorized composite of 2 clear filter NAC shots of Enceladus, the upper one is a 1.2 second exposure, the lower one is a 18 second exposure. Views on the right are enhanced to bring out subtle plume structure. The overall hue is that of the E ring seen at this phase angle (178 degrees).

Note Enceladus' shadow on the E ring in the lower composite.

EDIT: And here's a merge of the two exposures in an attempt to maximize S/N ratio, again with (too?) heavy enhancing done:

The two most prominent jets trace back to the south pole nicely, but there's a peculiar detached, slightly curved 'puff' or two to the left of the long jet that doesn't seem to trace back. It appears torn apart. Even more curious is another streak that appears to emanate above the northern latitudes. I don't think either is an artifact of the processing (similar to the brightening around shadow edge and the limb).

Is Enceladus' gravity strong enough to perturb the jets that hard?

[Floyd]

This orbit they have really concentrated on Saturn images. I guess because of the phase angle, and the leisurely pace of this larger than most orbit, has made it ideal to just look back and watch the Saturn weather.

[The Messenger]

leisure pace? surely you jest. The Cassini navigators are always in a state of near panick when on-shift, neurotic when not. Think about level ten Tetres.

[scalbers]

zOMG

Hi - were those ray like features near the bottom pointing away from Saturn a camera reflection or some type of new phenomenon? I recall seeing more of these in other versions at other azimuths as well.