You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Enceladus, Mimas Transit Saturn

Enceladus, Mimas Transit Saturn

Here is a recent set of raw Saturn images (red, green and blue filters) combined to create a near-true color shot. Moon motion in RGBOf course, the moons and Cassini were both moving and changing the perspective of the 3 bodies from one another from one filtered exposure to the next (the effects of which can be seen at left). So it was required that the 2 moons be “lifted” from the main image, properly registered for each individual moon and then merged back into the main composition. Once in place, a bit of Photoshop retouching was needed to erase the echoes in the 2 other channels where the moons were before registration was corrected.

The raw files archive on the Cassini site only reports which object was targeted, so it did not specify that the other moon is Mimas… but I cannot image what other globe that could possibly be seemingly inside Enceladus’s orbit.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Enceladus, Mimas, Saturn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Enceladus, Mimas Transit Saturn”

  1. Gordan Says:
    September 22nd, 2007 at 9:05 am

    It is indeed Mimas. There’s a third moon visible below Enceladus and inside the F ring. I now believe it’s Atlas judging by the size. See here.

  2. thomas Says:
    September 22nd, 2007 at 9:49 am

    bully for me… my color version looks nearly the same as yours! although, you can see tiny Atlas a touch clearer in yours. i really just lined up the pixels on this one and didn’t do any really advanced “pixel shifting”… so it is likely just not as sharp. and the blues at the edges of your saturn disk seem more pronounced.

    still… not so bad for a graphic designer… eh?

  3. Gordan Says:
    September 22nd, 2007 at 10:20 am

    There’s really not that much advanced magic when producing images like these from red/green/blue filtered stuff. Just some tweaking/sharpening/registering. The beauty of raw images where you see a gray object (such as Enceladus here) is the automatic contrast stretcher on the raw site practically prepares the images for you since Enceladus really is white. That’s why both our versions look very similar.

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