You're welcome. I actually think that the JPL people do pretty well at getting information out rapidly, and despite the usual carping, I even think ESA did better than usual and better than expected with Huygens. But one thing that we've had less of than we could is color pictures.
Color is, I think, important to catch people's attention, and Cassini's usually taken the shots necessary to make nice color pictures. But actually putting them together takes some manual labor (which doesn't really have a direct scientific payoff), and they're often too busy to spend a lot of time on that.
Also, the colors of Saturn's moons other than Titan are often extremely subtle, and getting them wrong without saying so can terribly confuse people. (Sometimes they get confused anyway; I saw a Washington Post article that claimed that methane gives Titan "a greenish cast", an idea the reporter obviously gathered from looking at false-color infrared pictures, possibly from the imaging spectrometer.)
The great thing about the Internet and readily-available photo editing technology, though, is that amateurs can actually step in and fill the gap to some extent.
Re: Thanks for the pretties!
Date: 2005-01-20 04:14 am (UTC)Color is, I think, important to catch people's attention, and Cassini's usually taken the shots necessary to make nice color pictures. But actually putting them together takes some manual labor (which doesn't really have a direct scientific payoff), and they're often too busy to spend a lot of time on that.
Also, the colors of Saturn's moons other than Titan are often extremely subtle, and getting them wrong without saying so can terribly confuse people. (Sometimes they get confused anyway; I saw a Washington Post article that claimed that methane gives Titan "a greenish cast", an idea the reporter obviously gathered from looking at false-color infrared pictures, possibly from the imaging spectrometer.)
The great thing about the Internet and readily-available photo editing technology, though, is that amateurs can actually step in and fill the gap to some extent.