Titan Images

Read posts above you for link and get ouit of the cave?



MrNightguy wrote:

So we are all just about bored with the stunning 3 or 4 Titan images out of
some 300
that were released. Why are the low balling us again? What is it with
space imaging people anyway? This same **** goes on at JPL or NASA too.
Why don't they just give us more?

Gigadude wrote...
The images seem to be very noisey with low signal/noise ratio. I was
wondering if maybe grit, contaminants, radiation damage caused lots of
speckles in the images which caused the image compression algorithm to
waste bits encoding image speckles/artifacts instead of Titan features.
Was this unexpected? If so this is a big disapointment. Do you think
there is anyway they can recover from this, or is the information lost
forever?
The fact that fantastically interesting surface processes are just out
of visual distinction is very frustrating!
Look at
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/cameras.htm
to see how clear and nice the test images were....


But even midnight in Tucson Arizona would be better lit than Titan on a
sunny day.

.... or would it. What is the ambient light level in the Huygens Titan pics
comparable with?

- Peter

MrNightguy wrote:
don't they just give us more?

What the heck are you talking about? There are 37 pages of raw images on

the ESA

site, and the images are mirrored in various places. What is it you want,
exactly?

________________________________________________ _


Oh, I didn't realize that.

Is there anything about NASA and JPL that you didn't realize?

Uncle Bob

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:58:31 GMT, "Peter Smith"
wrote:

But even midnight in Tucson Arizona would be better lit than Titan on a
sunny day.

... or would it. What is the ambient light level in the Huygens Titan pics
comparable with?

If there were no clouds, the surface of Titan would appear about as bright as
the Earth on a stormy day. I'm not sure how much light is fully absorbed by the
atmosphere, but I'd guess that it's still quite a bit brighter than a full Moon
on Earth (which is a darn sight brighter than Tucson at midnight!)

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Chris L Peterson wrote...
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:58:31 GMT, "Peter Smith"
wrote:

But even midnight in Tucson Arizona would be better lit than Titan on a
sunny day.

... or would it. What is the ambient light level in the Huygens Titan
pics
comparable with?

If there were no clouds, the surface of Titan would appear about as
bright as
the Earth on a stormy day. I'm not sure how much light is fully absorbed
by the
atmosphere, but I'd guess that it's still quite a bit brighter than a
full Moon
on Earth (which is a darn sight brighter than Tucson at midnight!)


You got me interested to do some research!

Saturn is 10 times further from the Sun than Earth. So the incident light
will be 100 times less (inverse square law).

Earth values:
* Full sunlight 11000 lux
* Morning sunlight 6000 lux
* TV studios are lit at about 1,000 lux
* a bright office has about 400 lux of illumination
* moonlight represents about 1 lux

Take off two zeros to give Saturn/Titan sunlight values. 'Moonlight' could
be higher on Titan because Saturn may subtend over 100 times the sky area
than the moon does on Earth; but I'll leave this as an exercise.

- Peter

Peter Smith wrote:

* a bright office has about 400 lux of illumination

OOh to think I'm sitting here in Titan ambient conditions...
Must fix the heater in this office too.

;-)

Steve