Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

That-Soup3492 t1_j3ehsj3 wrote

So the colored spheres are Titan in the background?

46

Riegel_Haribo OP t1_j3ejawt wrote

Correct! Dione is the half-cratered small moon in the foreground (it has distinct geography in each hemisphere), while the large moon Titan with it's dense near-uniform atmosphere is moving in the background. You can also see the haze of Titan's high level atmosphere on the left. The visual color of Titan (when it is not evading capture) is like the orange-yellow at the dark edge of Dione.

35

That-Soup3492 t1_j3ekary wrote

It's cool to me that the giant gas planets have moons that would be dwarf planets if they were on their own, but the only rocky planet with a moon like that... is us.

13

Riegel_Haribo OP t1_j3eib0v wrote

Here instead, an animation of the monochrome source frames, where we see the alternating color filters instead changing the yellow atmosphere of Titan in to different levels of brightness in each exposure.

https://i.redd.it/glxpxisnopaa1.gif

As you can see from the gif's jitter, although Cassini was tracking Dione, I had to tweak each frame to line up Dione for this composite image (and moons are also rotating).

(yes, I know its/it's)...

40

SheeEttin t1_j3fgfv3 wrote

I can't help but hear the Jaws theme in my head when I watch this

3

Street-Badger t1_j3exlvb wrote

This is such a cool composition, I just love the shit out of it. Bravo

8

har3krishna t1_j3eo3sf wrote

Looks like the Cassini took some psychedelics 😂 Beautiful picture, it would be an awesome album cover.

5

btspman1 t1_j3eqmzp wrote

Amazing work! What equipment are you using? And do you sell prints? That would be an incredible image to have framed!

5

Riegel_Haribo OP t1_j3esvoe wrote

I used raw data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which traveled to and orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 (retired by crashing into Saturn). This imagery from December 2011 was taken by Imaging Science Subsystem's narrow-field camera, an 8" telescope.

Not even James Webb Space Telescope can capture Saturn's moons with this much detail - one must go there.

I sell nothing. Print it out and frame it! Here's more traditional imagery from the probe : NASA link.

16

Poop_Taxi t1_j3frhbt wrote

Do you have a link to a higher quality uncompressed copy of your composition? Reddit compression is no bueno. I'd like to try running it through an upscaler to see if I can get it into a printable resolution for hanging on my wall.

4

Riegel_Haribo OP t1_j3g27iu wrote

Going back to the nine-layer oversampled composition, here is 2048x2048 (double the source resolution) with no sharpening, but craters of the rotating moon aligned instead of the eclipse edge. https://i.imgur.com/trbuGZc.png

I tried an AI upsampler and it turned this into space junk. Titan's atmosphere IS blurry. https://i.imgur.com/xx3CJA1.png

I could put multiple high-res elements together to make a fake occultation, or even do a re-assembly of the transit in original moon colors, but I'm not a McCarthy. This is light right out of the telescope.

3

alien_clown_ninja t1_j3f1plp wrote

So cassini was tracking Dione, and titan "happened" to be in the background, that's pretty cool. I suppose the cassini team must have planned for this event to capture. I'm guessing most of the movement of titan shown here is actually movement of cassini, being close to Dione for that high res shot means a lot of parallax for far-away titan as cassini moves.

1

Hurr1canE_ t1_j3ir4ig wrote

Incredible work! Is there a way to expand the top and bottom edges of it and make it an AMOLED background to fit, say, an iPhone? I'd love to make this my phone lockscreen.

1

Riegel_Haribo OP t1_j3ixzj6 wrote

For your light-emitting screen, I dumped the background down to complete black, and also gave you some stars taken by Cassini (although needing a much longer exposure) https://i.imgur.com/N8LBnzv.jpg

1

Hurr1canE_ t1_j3j5wtq wrote

Oh my goodness this is so awesome, thank you so much for it! It looks amazing!

1

arxeef t1_j4jzhoq wrote

I'd love to use this image, DMed you for details!

1

chicken_n_waffles47 t1_j3farkl wrote

is this a real photo because the moon looks CGI asf or maybe I'm tripping...

0