[X] My Assistant

[0101Morpheus]

It's like I'm looking at liquid.

Wow.

I guess there's not that much difference between liquid and dense gas but this is easily one of the most spectacular photos I've ever seen of Saturn. Wow.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

In fact it just might be possible to extract some vertical relief information from these images by using two of them as a stereo pair and by correcting for the zonal (east-west) winds. The interval between the images has to be short though and the shape of the cloud features must be fairly stable over that interval.

I decided to experiment with this (possibly crazy) idea and tried using two of the north polar images as a stereo pair. The results were as I expected: Nothing interesting, i.e. no recognizable features, just noise. I might get better results once I have accurate viewing geometry information after this gets released at the PDS but I'm not expecting it. The interval between the images is probably too long for using them as stereo pairs. The shape of individual cloud features changes in the time that passes between the images and this makes stereo matching difficult and maybe impossible.

[JRehling]

The nominal altitude difference between cloud layers on Jupiter is about 60 km. On Saturn, that should be about 2.5x, or 150 km. At some level of magnification that must, obviously, allow stereo imaging, but the edges of the hexagon are almost 100 times that vertical difference, so the relief is likely very muted, maybe a couple of pixels, in any image that shows the whole hexagon.

The best "magnifying glass" we have for subtle relief in these clouds, as with Saturn's rings, and the lunar maria, etc. are the long shadows at very low sun angles. Stereo as seen looking down at a feature is less sensitive. There are stereo images of terrestrial cloud features as seen from orbit that might help define the baselines of what is required to get a nice effect.

[bill davis]

I had to go through a few pairs but I think this one shows some stereo effect.


Oops, I missed the earlier posts of these same images.

[titanicrivers]

Lots of nice images of Saturn's N Polar hurricane have been posted today in JPL's Photojournal. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Saturn