Saturn picture "Gold Mine" Link NEW Titan up close

I am not sure if this is new link but I found it today were we can finally view raw cassini images!!

They were slow leaking them I believe up till now. Its similar to the raw images offered by the Mars rover site except you can search. For instance try searching narrow camera and titan. LOTS of pictures!!

Yippie!

See you there..

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

and latest 500 images.

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

[edit on 1-7-2004 by Xeven]

[edit on 2-7-2004 by Xeven]

Lol, I was F5'ing this page since about 2 o'clock this afternoon. I love that all the pictures are made available, It's such a great resource. God bless the internet.

some really amazing shots of the rings. I was so hoping that they'd get some close-up shots of the thing. Too bad the images arn't as high of quality as the previous photos of Saturn were. Did they have to use a differnt camera or something?

Also some more cleaned up photos here in the latest images section, saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

These rings just baffel me and if anyone finds any science links that explains exactly what they are I would appreciate it. They seem foreign to me and I have trouble rappin my mind around exactly what they are, how they are made, and what they are made of. They almost look like groves in a record heh. Maybe the rings have a message imedded in them! Like a laser disk or even just plain old record disks...

Ok enough fun.. if anyone can explain how these are made and exactly what it is I would be real happy. They seem so strange..

The rings are matter that would have been moons. If matter trapped in the orbit clumps togeter enough, you get a moon. It the matter is too dispersed to clump together, but remains trapped in the gravity, you get rings due to the spinning.

Nasa computer models have predicted a lot of what they are now seeing in the rings, but there are some things they don't understand.

I was curious too Xeven, so I did a little searching on the net:

* What are Saturn's rings made of?

The rings are made of dusty water ice, which range in size from boulders to sand grains. Saturn's gravitational field constantly disrupts these ice chunks, keeping them spread out and preventing them from combining to form a moon.

This was taken from here

Hers is another interesting site about the color of Saturn's rings. Kind of an old article though:

Most people don't know that Saturn's rings aren't white but have a faint salmon color, which hints that a few percent of complex organic molecules are mixed in with the water ice the rings are mostly made of," Cuzzi said.

Saturn's seven small icy moons don't have such a reddish color, but many icy objects in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system do, he explained. This leads scientists to suspect that, unlike the moons, the rings were formed from an outer solar system object.

This object, they think, careened too close to Saturn and -- like comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 -- was torn apart by the massive planet's gravity, leaving a trail of debris.

This info I got from this website

This gives some info on Saturn's ring structure and it's divisions:

Saturn's ring system is divided up into 7 major divisions with alphabetic designators in the order of discovery. From the innermost ring to the outermost ring the designators are D, C, B, A, F, G and E. Each major division is further subdivided into thousands of individual ringlets. The F and G rings are very thin and difficult to see while the A, B, and C rings are broad and quite visible. Between the A and B rings is a gap called the Cassini division named after Giovanni Cassini who discovered the Gap in 1676. Between the A and F rings lies the Keeler (Encke) gap.

www.solarviews.com...

Hope this answers some of your questions on Saturn's rings.

A superb answer, thanks for taking the time to put that together for us. Very informative indeed.

Is this the begining of a moon? I read somewere that Saturn was like a mini
Solar system in many respects so watching a moon form would be like watching our planet earth form around the sun in some respects.





I cut this from this image at Cassini images page.

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

These pictures are going to keep me occupied for some time hehe.

This must be a defect in the camera as it shows up in more pictures even pictures of Titan. Ive removed the picture.

X

[edit on 2-7-2004 by Xeven]

Thank you Zzub. Thank you for taking the time to give me one of your monthly way above votes as well. It feels good to be appreciated.

I gave you a way above point to. Your reply was everything I could have asked for and more heh.

X

Originally posted by Xeven
Is this the begining of a moon? I read somewere that Saturn was like a mini
Solar system in many respects so watching a moon form would be like watching our planet earth form around the sun in some respects.

I don't believe it is. I watched a show on the Discover science channel a few nights ago, and they discribed the phenomenon. I can't remember exactly how they described it, but it is more like a shadow, or a free range chicken or something. Sorry, I'm getting silly. But seriously, these things have been observed since Gallileo, and they aren't believed to be the formation of a moon.

I will look to see if I can find the info on them for you.

ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu...

Titan up close and personal lots and lots of pictures!

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

wow you can see clouds etc.. I want to see color!

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

[edit on 2-7-2004 by Xeven]

To see color,

This is a quickee tutorial
I can't do this right now, but:

if you download consecutive raw images, of the same view.
Open them in photoshop,
Three of them to start.
They are already grayscale so, in the channels palette, click on the little arrow on the right, the dropdown will have "merge channels" use RGB,
Then you can select which image goes to which channel.

I don't know yet, which filter is which color (KANO probably knows, or will know soon)
, but at the VERY least you will have
a false color image, that gives you a little better perspective of what you are seeing.

I tried it with one image, it added a 3rd dimension to what I was seeing..

OR,,
you could wait for NASA..

OK I managed to sneak around a bit, and make one ...
It's quick n dirty but:
It looks like some surface features are visible thru the clouds.
Is this too big? Should I resize it?
I tried to make as few changes as possible, just a bit of contrast.

Image changed to smaller one, that also shows the limb of Titan





[edit on 2-7-2004 by spacedoubt]

[edit on 2-7-2004 by spacedoubt]

[edit on 3-7-2004 by spacedoubt]

[edit on 3-7-2004 by spacedoubt]

Well if were going to post our fake color pictures =).
Ill put my home made completely faked color Blue titan. Picture was not edited other than adding some saturation aand hue. Pretty hehe



Water World!

Ok Methane world...

X

[edit on 2-7-2004 by Xeven]

[edit on 2-7-2004 by Xeven]

Hey, mine aren't fake, they're FALSE.
There is a huge difference! LOL.

Don't you want to take some windex, and wipe those spots off the lens?
I read they had some fogging problems on the lens system, and had to run
some heaters, to clear it up. I guess a minor irritation considering the logistics
involved in such a mission..

Originally posted by spacedoubt

Hey, mine aren't fake, they're FALSE.
There is a huge difference! LOL.

Don't you want to take some windex, and wipe those spots off the lens?
I read they had some fogging problems on the lens system, and had to run
some heaters, to clear it up. I guess a minor irritation considering the logistics
involved in such a mission..

How do you make false images? Id like to know. Do you combine several of them or what?

Originally posted by Xeven
I gave you a way above point to. Your reply was everything I could have asked for and more heh.

X

Thank you Xeven, much appreciated!

I read they had some fogging problems on the lens system, and had to run

how the hell does something get fogged up in space???

Here's my un-edited RGB image of TITAN which
is built from 3 channels containing the three
original raw grayscale photographs.

(unsharp used lightly on image)



koti.mbnet.fi...

I think the picture clearly shows cloud formations with
some surface also. What do you think?

..AND yes, the colors aren't manipulated in any way.

[edit on 3-7-2004 by Drol Asharin]