[X] My Assistant

[Exploitcorporati...]

In the excitement leading up to the Iapetus flyby twelve days later, the 5000 km-range nontargeted Rhea encounter (49RH) recieved relatively little attention here. As we all know, Rhea is the most dynamic and thrilling of the worlds in orbit around Saturn, and I'm certain that the short shrift it's been given infuriates you all to the point of aneurysm. A combination of sucktastic downsampling on the raws page, smeared Saturnshine, and equatorial-ridge envy doomed this beautiful visit to oblivion. As I've had the pleasure of taking a day off to play with these (thanks Emily for that awesome Selected ISS Data page!) I'm proud/drunk to present The Forgotten Flyby.

[Exploitcorporati...]

*&%#$@in' amazing, Gordan! You have no idea how many times I've premptively edited posts (or avoided making them altogether) to avoid the expletive-induced banhammer on account of your work. I did a preliminary overlay of your color product with my fake Saturn backdrop (derived from your WAC composite from the same flyby) and the western dark sliver of the mosaic from my attempt, and the alignment is decent. Mind if I post the hybrid in a few days?

That equatorial band looks prominent and very real in stretching this image.

[ugordan]

You're too kind, EC. By all means go ahead with combining the two views, I'm eager to see how that turns out!

I agree the equatorial "band" (dark patch string might be a better term actually) can be seen stretching quite a long way across the disc. Very interesting. It's virtually invisible in a RGB view showing the same hemisphere, but at lower phase angle taken in November 2005: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3179/281438...25ee27152_o.jpg .
Photoshop's rescaling algorithms leave a lot to be desired, the top left mosaic footprint is noticeably blurred compared to others as any, even the least bit of scaling further blurs the image. That particular footprint for example was scaled twice (alignment issues), unlike others which were scaled just one time.