Celestia on official Cassini website

[DonAVP]

I get emails from the Cassini mission people (CICLOS). They posted a link to there site about Mimas that is due for a fly by this weekend. Low and behold there are some images of the moon that looks like screen grabs from good old Celestia. Here is the link

http://ciclops.org/view/6188/Rev126?js=1

[piellepi]

At the and of the post there is the following message:
"Image products created in Celestia. Mimas and Tethys basemaps by Steve Albers. All dates in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)."

[volcanopele]

Yep, they sure are We post previews of ISS (and occasionally other instruments) observations for each Cassini orbit. Celestia is used simply because it is the easiest for me to update (in terms of spice kernels and textures) and the graphics are a lot better.

[DonAVP]

Yep, they sure are We post previews of ISS (and occasionally other instruments) observations for each Cassini orbit. Celestia is used simply because it is the easiest for me to update (in terms of spice kernels and textures) and the graphics are a lot better.

Are you working at CICLOS, volcanopele? How many others know about Celestia in the scientific community? Is JPL aware of it?

Just curious, that's all? I would like to brag that such and such organization is using Celestia when I tell people about the program.

Don

Edit: It sure would be nice if we could get an up-to-date texture map of these moons after the fly by. Is there any chance of that happening?

[volcanopele]

No, I don't work at CICLOPS, which is the team leader's Carolyn Porco's little shop; I work for one of the other Imaging Team members. However, one of my tasks is writing up the Looking Ahead articles for each orbit and working on the graphics, which are generally created in Celestia with some mild editing to remove some extraneous text. I'm not sure on how popular Celestia is in the scientific community, I just prefer it because it is easy to create add-ons for it, change out textures, and thanks to SPICE kernel support, is just as accurate as some of the other visualization software that is used around the different teams.

The updated maps from the team do take a bit longer simply because they require more work and massaging than single frames or even mosaics. Steve Albers usually has maps out a bit faster since his aren't as geometrically or photometrically controlled, but they do look pretty good.