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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Wallpaper: Iapetus Bright Portrait

Wallpaper: Iapetus Bright Portrait

It had to happen… regularly featured on this site Gordan Ugarkovic stitches together an awesome hi-res full globe image of Iapetus only a few days after the closest approach (see previous post for even larger sized wallpaper for bigger monitors). I usually only label an image a “portrait” once for each body, but seeing as Iapetus has two different sides… I think it deserves two. Here is the darker side imaged earlier in 2005.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 9:46 pm and is filed under 1440x900, Iapetus, Wallpaper, portrait. 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.

6 Responses to “Wallpaper: Iapetus Bright Portrait”

  1. Gordan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 2:09 am

    I was absolutely exhausted after finishing this one. The black & white version was done fairly quickly, but processing an additional 45 frames for color was tedious.
    I wonder if (and when) CICLOPS will release a natural color mosaic or just the IR/G/UV stretched color one. It would be interesting to see how off I was in brightness and color, compared to calibrated data.

  2. thomas Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 8:25 am

    i linked to the older “dark” side image and from what i recall that is a NASA image. seems much more brown than what these images gave us. all the images in raw always say that they will be calibrated… is there somewhere to see the calibrated images when they get done?

  3. Gordan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 8:43 am

    That image is a colorization of a grayscale image using color from their north hemisphere shot. That shot was in turn composed of IR/green/blue IIRC so it’s more saturated (more red) than in reality. Here are my processings of calibrated data that should be closer to natural color: http://img209.imageshack.us/my.php?image=iapetustw3.jpg

  4. Gordan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    No, the raw page states wrongly, only full quality raw data is released to the PDS after 9 months, not calibrated data. Calibrated data might come after the end of the mission. Voyagers for example just recently got their Saturn flyby calibrated release.

  5. thomas Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

    oh my… voyager? that took a lifetime. is it manpower they lack or is it that hard?

  6. Gordan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 4:44 pm

    Mostly manpower/funding I think. Though the Voyager dataset is not as easy to calibrate due to vidicon tubes - they distort the image geometrically so they need to be corrected, hence those reseau marks were placed in the optics. There were also apparently some other problems with calibration and it’s being worked on slowly.

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