Titan and friends from recent official Cassini mission releases.
Shown with Saturn
Shown with Dione against a Saturn and rings nearly edge-on in the background. Looks like a NASA re-interpretation of this image.
With Tethys against more edge-on rings.
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We may have a new best of Cassini shots with this one. The color composite was executed by Ian Regan who was the creator of another Cassini favorite here at wanderingspace.
This composite has been kicked around a bunch on unmannedspaceflight.com. Contained within it are two separate images taken by the Cassini mission at nearly the same time but different exposures. Looking at this scene with human eyes, the big difference would likely be that the geysers would not be blown out and would look more like a multiple of gentle hazes spewing upward. The other big difference would be that you were somehow on a mission to Saturn and not browsing the web.
Above are the two original exposures. These were merely combined with a photo editing tool. The geyser haze was blurred in areas to clean out compression artifacts and the color was artistically added by Gordan Ugarkovic. While the color is artificially generated, it does accurately reflect the same overall appearance of most natural light images of Titan.
Sort of getting over the whole, “hey, we got two moons in the same frame” thing on the Cassini mission. But this one of Tethys ducking behind Titan’s thick hazy atmosphere kind of looks like a scene from a Star Wars movie.
This is so nice, but I am furious that I didn’t get to design this. This is Information design at it’s best naturally by National Geographic. You can see 50 years of robotic planetary exploration at a glance. It even includes failed missions represented by darker desaturated lines. As far as I can tell the cream colored lines are US and the red ones are Soviet. Interesting to see how many of those lines go dark around Mars.
Now where does one purchase such a thing? Perhaps this month’s issue of NG? Here is the link to it on their site complete with zoom viewer and them some kind samaritan posted a hires version to flickr.
Nice example of science meets Hollywood.
Emily Lakdawalla recently posted some images from the Cassini raw image database and I noticed that she had posted 2 similar images taken the same day. One had Saturn’s disc over exposed and the other had Saturn exposed much better with the rings too dark and lacking detail. These crescent images often make it difficult for Cassini’s cameras to get a single exposure with both elements with proper exposure because Saturn’s disk is so much brighter than the back-lit rings.
So i retrieved the images from the same day, recompiled them, did a little manual color balancing based on one of Gordan Ugarkovic’s recent crescent Saturn images and finally merged the two elements together. So, in reality the rings were taken at a slightly different time than Saturn’s disc was. However, since Cassini takes it’s color images one filter at a time (red, green and then blue), that is really true of any color image compiled from the mission database.
Also visible in the image is a small crescent Tethys and Titan’s shadow on the cloud tops.
Not to re-post old material, but our iPhone planetary skins were recently posted to fuelyourcreativity.com for free download. So I thought I would just remind everyone and maybe direct a little traffic love their way.
You may have seen this already, but we were keeping it on the side for a slow image week. What makes the photo more exciting than the hundreds of Cassini images coming back daily, is that you can see 4 of Saturn’s moons as well: Titan, Enceladus, Mimas and Dione.
Taken by Cassini on May 28, 2008. Part of an on-going effort to offer images of Titan that show some kind of details in visible light.
Best compilation of Titan colorized descent images I have seen yet from NASA. I do suspect the actual color of Titan - on the ground - would look less metallic than these do. All the color seen here is based upon educated guesses and applied over the black and white images returned by Huygens. There were no real color images taken by Huygens during descent.
I plan to do a long post on some amazing renders made for an Italian magazine based upon actual imagery and data… but I am so busy these days. It will go up eventually.
Map-makers of the world rejoice! For the first time since the days of Columbus, you now have the opportunity to map out the details of undiscovered shores! Tim Minton has a passion for map-making, but his pursuits usually involve Earthly destinations – how could he resist the new Lakes and Seas of another world? Check out his flickr page for other maps and in particular his Titan set.
