Selfless,
I can’t do anything about your mistrust of NASA or the Cassini photo’s. I might be able to help you understand the images a little better. I am a
working CGI professional with 19 years of experience. My wife is and award winning photographer and I have 20 years experience as an amateur. I’m
more advanced than many professionals’ are. We use both film and digital equipment all Nikon Professional bodies and lenses. I can not blame you for
your mistrust of photos on the web. There is a lot of abuse and outright fraud especially where UFO photos are concerned. It has made me very
skeptical myself.
On your monitor you are viewing these images at 72 dpi (dots per inch). Your eye fills in the area in between so you are unaware you are viewing a
series of dot’s. The same goes for images printed from your computer. I print at 300 dpi or above. When I need the extra detail I routinely print at
1200 dpi. When you make a print from film it is continuous coverage (not dots). Because of this the digital image appears too perfect and too real at
times. A lot of the tiny detail is missing and even though you can not see that it is missing visibly your eye picks up on that and there is something
not quite right about the image. Especially high quality uncompressed images. Most images you see on the Internet are highly compressed and have many
artifacts making them look a lot less than perfect. When you see a high quality compressed image or a raw uncompressed image it looks to good to you
because you are used to seeing the garbage usually shown on the Internet of necessity to keep the file size small. Internet images are also generally
sharpened through various methods to compensate for the lower quality of a digital image when compared to a film image. A negative contains more
information than a digital scanner is capable of picking up. I have read it would take a scan of near 38,000 dpi to equal film quality. A 38,000 dpi
(optical not through interpolation) scan of a 35mm negative would be such a huge file, your computer could not even open it. I scan at 4,800 dpi
(optical) to produce print images at up to 11inches x 14 inches, which works out about right. So you see the 72dpi images you are viewing will never
look as real as a print from a negative.
I’ve spent the last couple of hours at the Cassini site looking at both raw and full quality .tif images. There are many close-ups of Saturn’s
surface and rings. I also did a search and looked at some photos from telescopes. Of course the telescope photos will never compare to the high
quality digital images from Cassini. I see no reason whatsoever to believe the images are not real. They are much clearer than the telescope photos
but that is to be expected. The telescope photos are shot through the atmosphere and from a much greater distance.
The Cassini images show no sign of any manipulation whatsoever. There is no sharpening and they have not been altered in my opinion. Because they are
digital and not sharpened, or corrected they will look to smooth to you. You are just viewing a digital image taken by a good camera that has been
unaltered. You are used to seeing garbage photos taken by consumer level cameras. Don’t let the megapixel numbers on these consumer cameras confuse
you. A 5.1 megapixel image from a professional camera is so far superior to a 8 megapixel image from a consumer camera that there is no comparison. I
currently shoot at about 12 megapixel and there are large format digital studio cameras now that can shoot at 3 times that.
My Conclusion: These Cassini images are authentic. The raw images show no sign of manipulation. These are the best photos you will find until there is
a future mission with even better equipment. No image from a telescope will ever equal these images. Skepticism is a good thing until it crosses the
line into unfounded paranoia. If you are convinced that all Saturn photos are fake and that every Astronomer on Earth is in the conspiracy then nobody
will be able to show you a photo you think is real. Do you need the points for some reason or are you really this paranoid? Maybe you should take a
break from conspiracy boards for a while. I don't mean this as an insult or a dig. If you immerse yourself in these boards too much it is not
healthy.
Here are two links to close-ups. The first is a raw file and my favorite of the ones I viewed.
pic link 1
pic link 2