Celestia Forums

It??s not possible that Saturn is so feauterless that only infrared images reveal some detail.Even from Earth??s surface,we can see a spot some times and many bands.Why Cassini insist in only taking pictures of the gas giant in infrared?I browse the raw images and besides the first pictures,all of these are in infrared or in methane filter.It??s absurd!
And we can??t use this pictures to improve Saturn texture,because Celestia is realistic and most of planet and moons textures are in visual wavelenghts.Can someone explain what is the problem?

danielj wrote:It??s not possible that Saturn is so feauterless that only infrared images reveal some detail.Even from Earth??s surface,we can see a spot some times and many bands.Why Cassini insist in only taking pictures of the gas giant in infrared?I browse the raw images and besides the first pictures,all of these are in infrared or in methane filter.It??s absurd!
And we can??t use this pictures to improve Saturn texture,because Celestia is realistic and most of planet and moons textures are in visual wavelenghts.Can someone explain what is the problem?

There isn't a problem at all - at least not with Cassini. The problem is that you evidently don't appreciate that Cassini wasn't sent up there to provide textures for Celestia or to satisfy your aesthetic needs, it was sent up there to do science.

The reason they use IR wavelengths to see the bands and spots and clouds is that they stand out more in those wavelengths and are more visible (after processing).
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1337
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1331


Still, there are some images taken in visible light. This one is a blue filter, for example:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... mageID=596

and this is a true colour image:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... mageID=600

If you want Saturn to have very visible bands and spots though, then you'll just have to accept a texture with an IR component. In visible light, you can just about see bands, and that's it. Cassini's going to be in orbit for at least another 3 years, probably longer. I'm sure there'll be plenty of visible light images of Saturn taken in that time.

Admittedly though, it would be easier if we could search through the raw images by filter type, so we could just find the red/green/blue filter images... maybe they'll incorporate that later.

and this is a true colour image:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... mageID=600

In this picture,I can see some spots and I think other images of this type could help to improve Celestia??s Saturn texture.Ok,I will wait.
I am not complaning for nothing.I know that infrared provide more detail and so on,but I was surprised because we have real color pictures from Voyager,Hubble and even real color images from Cassini??s Jupiter rendesvouz.
But I think you are right.They will add these later.
Based in this,we can say that Titan??s texture are only a high resolution albedo map,i.e,we don??t know any real feature of this moon?

danielj wrote:and this is a true colour image:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... mageID=600

In this picture,I can see some spots and I think other images of this type could help to improve Celestia??s Saturn texture.Ok,I will wait.

And bear in mind that it seems that these storms are transient - there aren't any permanent ones like the GRS on Jupiter. So duplicating them in a Celestia texture isn't particularly realistic, since they may well disappear in the space of a few days or weeks. Also not that most of those storms are actually quite small.

I am not complaning for nothing.I know that infrared provide more detail and so on,but I was surprised because we have real color pictures from Voyager,Hubble and even real color images from Cassini??s Jupiter rendesvouz.

AFAIK none of the raw images from Cassini's Jupiter have been released yet (unless I missed them. I haven't seen them anywhere myself). Quite how many of the thousands of images it took during that flyby were taken using red/green/blue filters is unknown.

Based in this,we can say that Titan??s texture are only a high resolution albedo map,i.e,we don??t know any real feature of this moon?

The surface texture? It's not even very high resolution - the atmosphere still seems to be sufficiently hazy to blur the views through the IR filter that we've seen of the surface so far. That effectively reduces the resolution quite considerably, so that at most all we've seen of Titan's surface - beyond the small snippet taken by Huygens - is very blurry and fuzzy looking. Even the supposedly high resolution views that have been published don't show much:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1161

I've only seen one high resolution shot of the surface from cassini, and that's here: url=http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1165

But generally, I'd call the surface textures we have so far "low resolution albedo maps". Better than nothing, but we certainly haven't seen Titan's surface at the sort of resolution that we've seen say, Dione's.

The radar has had more luck penetrating, but the problem is that what we've seen from that is so far largely incomprehensible. I think the radar images need to be processed a lot more before we can make much sense of that.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1177
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1176
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1171
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1167

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:AFAIK none of the raw images from Cassini's Jupiter have been released yet (unless I missed them. I haven't seen them anywhere myself). Quite how many of the thousands of images it took during that flyby were taken using red/green/blue filters is unknown.

I think I read somewhere on the Cassini website with the images that the raw images back as early as the Jupiter flyby were never going to be released to the public.

Michael Kilderry