This page contains images and photomosaics that I have created from raw spacecraft
images, in most cases as 'by-products' while creating planetary maps. In some cases these
images/mosaics are spectacular and in all cases they are either completely new or better
(IMHO) than similar stuff available elsewhere (after all, if this weren't the case I would
simply have used what was available elsewhere !).
Some of these images are also available through links on other pages at this site.
Click the images for full size versions.
| Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager 1 |
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This is a 4x3 mosaic of individual color images of Jupiter's Great Red
Spot. Each individual color image was created from raw orange and violet images that had
to be individually calibrated and processed. I also created synthetic green images because
no green images were obtained during this particular imaging sequence. Processing the raw
images involved calibrating them, reprojecting them to simple cylindrical projection,
mosaicking them and then rendering the cylindrical mosaic on an ellipsoid using a typical
viewing geometry (there is no such thing as a "correct viewing geometry" because
the images were obtained over a 37 minute period with Jupiter rotating). I then fixed the
color balance. The final step was to sharpen the resulting image a bit, mainly to
compensate for all of the resampling that the previous processing steps required. For this
version of the image I also increased the contrast and sharpness to better reveal various
small scale details. This mosaic reveals lots of small scale details, for example
features that seem to be vertical relief and cloud shadows are visible at various
locations, especially southeast of Great Red Spot.
The 24 individual images I used were obtained by Voayger 1 on March 4,1979 at a distance
of about 1.85 million km. The first image (C1635314.IMQ) was obtained at 07:08:36 and the
last one (C1635400.IMQ) at 07:45:24. The resolution is roughly 18 km/pixel.
Mosaics of some of these images have appeared before as 'official' image releases but
interestingly, only 3x2 images were used in all cases. The offical mosaic can be seen here. There is a false color
version (lots of blue color) that is better known; it's available here. |
| Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager 2 |
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A 5x3 mosaic of Voyager 2 images Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS). The
image processing was very similar to the processing described above for the Voyager 1
mosaic with the exception that here green images were available. The 45 individual
images used for creating this mosaic were obtained by Voyager 2 on July 8, 1979 when the
spacecraft was 1.45 million km from Jupiter; the resolution is roughly 14 km/pixel.
This mosaic reveals that many changes occurred in the GRS area in the four months that
separate this mosaic and the Voyager 1 mosaic above. In particular, the white spot south
of the GRS in the Voyager 2 mosaic is not the same spot as the one visible in the Voyager
1 mosaic. |
|
New - Jupiter's Great Red Spot
from Voyager 2 (a more distant view) |
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Another Voyager 2 mosaic of the Great Red Spot, this time a 3x2 mosaic. The
18 individual images used for creating this mosaic were obtained by Voyager 2 on July 7,
1979 when the spacecraft was 2.7 million km from Jupiter; the resolution is roughly 26
km/pixel.
It is interesting to compare this mosaic to the higher resolution Voyager 2 mosaic
above. This one was obtained about 30 hours (3 Jovian rotations) earlier. The changes in
this short period of time are remarkable. |
| Jupiter from Voyager 2 |
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This 3x3 mosaic of Jupiter was created from images taken by the Voyager 2
spacecraft on June 30, 1979 from a distance of 8.7 million km. It is created from orange
and violet filtered images used as red and blue respectively. When the spacecraft was this
close to Jupiter it photographed it using only these two filters so I had to use a
synthetic green image. In cases like this it is common for the synthetic image to be
simply the average of the other two images but looking at images taken from a greater
distance I noticed that the green images look far more like the orange than violet ones.
This had the effect that if I made the areas that are supposed to be approximately white
(e.g. the North Tropical Zone) white Jupiter's overall color became too reddish. So
instead of using the average of orange and violet I determined which combination of the
orange and violet images was most similar to an actual green image in a least squares
sense by measuring the color of several areas in the images (e.g. the Great Red Spot, a
white oval, a dark belt and a bright zone). The resulting synthetic green image was
remarkably similar to an actual green image. The first steps were to radiometrically
correct the orange and violet images and then to remove noise using Photoshop.
I then reprojected the orange and violet images to simple cylindrical projection. To do
this I had to partially reverse engineer the spacecraft's viewing geometry, I knew its
location relative to Jupiter but not the direction in which its camera was looking. I then
aligned the images to each other and created the synthetic green images. The cylindrical
map was a necessary step, because of Jupiter's rapid rotation it is not possible to mosaic
the images themselves directly. I then added fictional data to a small, blank area near
the north pole and fixed the terminator (this was necessary due to Jupiter's rotation
while the images where obtained). The final step was to render the resulting map from the
spacecraft's location making Jupiter 'self-illuminating' and using no light source.
This resulted in this spectacular 2048x2048 pixel image. Strangely, this is the only
Voyager high resolution global mosaic of Jupiter that I have ever seen.
This is all the more strange since doing mosaics like this is relatively easy using todays
software and computers. However, this wasn't the case back in 1979 when the images were
taken. |
| Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager 2 |
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This is a 3 image mosaic of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the solar system's
largest weather system. It is bigger than the Earth and has been present at least since
the 19th century and possibly for a much longer time. This mosaic was created from
images obtained by the Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 6, 1979 from a distance of 3.8 million
km. It was created similarly to the global mosaic of Jupiter (below), except for two
things: Effects of varying illumination across the images have been removed. Finally,
contrast and color saturation were enhanced somewhat to increase the visibility of various
features.
The mosaic shows the Great Red Spot viewed from directly above. This eliminates the
foreshortening that was present in the original images since Voyager 2 was located a
little north of the equatorial plane when the images were taken. However, the red spot is
approximately 22 degress south of the equator. This is also the reason the white oval
south of the Great Red Spot appears almost circular here while in the original images it
appears elongated in the horizontal direction. |
| Ganymede in color |
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These color images of Ganymede were obtained by Voyager 1 (top row),
Galileo (lower left) and Voyager 2 (lower right and center). The Voyager images are
composed from orange, blue and violet filtered images and the Galileo image from IR-7560,
green and violet. The red/pink color in the bright crater in the Galileo image is present
because some of the source images were saturated at this spot. I used images like these to
colorize my map of Ganymede. |
| A global view of Ganymede |
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This is a well known Voyager 2 color image of Ganymede. It is composed
from orange, blue and violet filtered images used as red, green and blue respectively.
This is a reprocessed version where noise was first removed from the source images, thus
almost no spurious, sharply defined blue or red spots appear in the image. The source
images have also been slightly rotated in 3D space to account for the fact that the
spacecraft's location relative to Ganymede changed slightly between the individual images. |
