Deep Impact camera data, Messing about with images from the PDS Options

[elakdawalla]

I'm wondering if anybody here has spent any time working on the Tempel 1 images from Deep Impact. The data are available at the Small Bodies Node (see e.g. http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/holdings/dif-c...0/dataset.html), and Version 2 of the PDS archive (which appears to have been published 3 years ago) includes versions of the data that have been calibrated, cleaned of instrument artifacts, and converted to units of radiance and also I/F. The HRI data have not been deconvolved to remove the blur: a bit of playing shows that without deconvolution, HRI images look pretty similar to MRI images. Attached is a color composite I made of the highest-resolution full-globe shots of Tempel 1 captured by the MRI before the impact. The image isn't big but there's more variety in color than I expected. This is made from the I/F images and is an RGB composite of red, green, and violet continuum filter images, overlaid over a clear image that I sharpened slightly. It's very red, but I think that's real.

Has anybody else worked with these?

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[brellis]

Color pics are really just a relatively narrow band of spectrograph, nest-ce pas?

[ugordan]

Color pics are really just a relatively narrow band of spectrograph, nest-ce pas?

Not color pics per se, but human eye can see only in some 300 nm wavelength span. Space rocks generally have flat spectra and the curves are not very steep (generally pick your favorite shade of red/brown), providing for very soft hues. If your color pics are composed of say UV and IR filters (in addition to one filter covering the visible - typically green), extending beyond the visible, they are called "enhanced color" in that they effectively increase saturation on abovementioned objects with flat spectra.