[X] My Assistant

[Decepticon]

2005-Apr-16 Titan close flyby & gravity assist (T5)
(best view to date) 950 From http://www.planetary.org/saturn/cassini_tour.html


Another look at the same hemisphere as in T4 ( My favorite so far, so much more interesting )

From above hours before closest approach. http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?t...porbs=1&brite=1

[edstrick]

I do industrial image processing to make $, but I can play some with planetary data on the side at work. I have some image processing routines I developed that progressively enhance detail as features get smaller, originally developed for digital x-ray radiography. These can have considerable use in planetary images, particularly low contrast targets like gas giant atmospheres, and Titan.

I applied the enhancement to pia06228, the near IR band image of titan's surface and it brings out a lot more details than the press-release version, particularly 2 or 3 plume like features north of the northern edge of the low latitude dark features. Haze layer variations on the limb and north polar haze-cap are very visible.

PIA06229 contained a near IR surface image as the green band, a visible image as red and a methane band image as blue. Attached are highly enhanced versions of the methane and visible band images, and a less severely enhanced of the two combined as a color image without the near IR surface band to muck up atmosphere feature visibility. There are a lot of fine details in the visible band image at low latitudes, but much of them are below the single-pixel signal-to-noise level of the camera, and they are streaky, east-west, so it will be rather difficult to use them to map atmosphere rotation at that level in the atmosphere.

PIA06230 is a red/green/blue image, butterscotch color in natural rendition. Enhancement brings out a a significant amount of low contrast features in the northern polar region, plus latitudinal variations in limb haze structure.

Hope you like.

Attached thumbnail(s)