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Rhea behind the rings
Jul. 1st, 2006 11:23 pmI haven't messed with Cassini pictures in a while, so here's a new color composite:
This is made from raw images taken by Cassini today and posted to the Web site. The nasty JPEG artifacts are from the original (or, rather, the Web JPEG version of the original). I had to mess around with the pictures a lot, since they didn't register consistently: the spacecraft, Rhea, and that bright knot in the F ring on the right edge of the rings were all moving around in different directions between the red, green and blue-filter shots. So I had to make multiple superpositions of the images with different relative shifts and cut and paste them to get something more or less consistent for the chroma, which I then used to colorize the green-filter image (it's usually best to take that last step, using the color composite to colorize a single monochrome shot, just for maximum sharpness).
You can still see a tiny bit of nacreous sheen to the bright ring knot, where my paste-up job wasn't perfect.
This was a significant amount of work for not a great deal of payoff, since Saturn's rings only have subtle golden-brown colors and Rhea is not very colorful at all in visible light. But I think there's some interest in seeing what the colors more or less look like.
This is made from raw images taken by Cassini today and posted to the Web site. The nasty JPEG artifacts are from the original (or, rather, the Web JPEG version of the original). I had to mess around with the pictures a lot, since they didn't register consistently: the spacecraft, Rhea, and that bright knot in the F ring on the right edge of the rings were all moving around in different directions between the red, green and blue-filter shots. So I had to make multiple superpositions of the images with different relative shifts and cut and paste them to get something more or less consistent for the chroma, which I then used to colorize the green-filter image (it's usually best to take that last step, using the color composite to colorize a single monochrome shot, just for maximum sharpness).
You can still see a tiny bit of nacreous sheen to the bright ring knot, where my paste-up job wasn't perfect.
This was a significant amount of work for not a great deal of payoff, since Saturn's rings only have subtle golden-brown colors and Rhea is not very colorful at all in visible light. But I think there's some interest in seeing what the colors more or less look like.