[X] My Assistant

[CosmicRocker]

I hope this hasn't previously been explained, because I haven't found the answer. This is something I have wondered about for a long time, and I am sure someone here can explain it. Most of the JPGs we all download from JPL are grayscale images, yet they are three times the size they need to be, because they are in RGB format. The additional channels do not provide any more information. It's simply annoying to people like myself who are forced to use dialup, and possibly more expensive for everyone than it needs to be.

The only explanations I have been able to come up with are that, it is just an oversight of the webmasters, NASA/JPL gets its bandwidth for free and doesn't care about the rest of us, or... (someone fill in the blank).

What's the deal, here?

[djellison]

I dont know why they do it - Cassini images are Greyscale..

BUT

You're not having to download 3x as much data. If it were BMP's or PNG's then perhaps you might - but JPG's are a little cleverer than that - instead of 200-300kb, they'd be about 150-200kb instead, not <100k. Perhaps 1/3rd less ( I tried a few in photoshop )

Doug