WOW!!!
5 years after flyby...

Cassini\'s Best Maps of Jupiter

THAT's cool! thanks for the heads up.

Now I'm going to sit back and see what cool tricks our UMSF colleagues can do with this image. Anyone for a high res rotating spherical projection gif?

Quick and dirty with Celestia. This is fairly heavily jpeg reduced but you get the idea. It's quite a nice map and the two small white oval storms that have subsequently become Red Junior /Oval BA are nicely visible.
Looks pretty cool alright spinning around. I'd post a video but avi's ain't allowed.
Click to view attachment

If you want to post a video, you can upload it it to this website:

http://rapidshare.de/

Then, all you need to do is post the resultant link here.

Darn if I don't owe you another beer, dude. Nice, very nice.

Sorry to spoil the party but I made an even higher resolution map (7560x3780 pixels) several months ago. I just added a smaller version (2880x1440 pixels) of it to my website. Also the color balance of my map is probably more realistic, at least compared to what Jupiter looks like to me through a telescope. However, Jupiter's color is somewhat subjective.

And this may be nitpicking but the claim that the CICLOPS maps "are the most detailed global color maps of Jupiter ever produced" is obviously false . Even the full-size version of the map I made back in 2002 based on Voyager 2 images is bigger (5040x2520 pixels) .

Several renderings based on these maps can be seen on my Jupiter page.

No spoiling for me at any rate - your imaging\rendering\texture work is awesome.

Anyway just to compare (hope you don't mind) :
Celestia movie of IO Eclipse shadow traversing Bjorn Jonsson's texture.
Celestia movie of IO Eclipse shadow traversing the Cassini Jupiter Map

Bjorn's does look more real to me too I must say but the Cassini texture is very vivid.

I know the textures aren't properly aligned - I have no idea what the correct position of 0 longitude at the time of the images would be so I left them as they were.

Thanks to Ian R for pointing out that these folks will host this. The files are quite small - both under half a meg so it would be neater to have them here. *Edit* Found a way to persuade GooglePages to host em so I changed the links so it's less jumping through hoops to get the files. Thanks all the same as that image hosting site should be useful for genuinely big stuff.

These use the Divx 5.2.1 codec so there may be problems viewing them.

Bjorn - if you have any problems with my using your texture just let me know I'll remove the video it ASAP.

No problem. However, I cannot download the animation created using my map.

The location of longitude 0 should be correct in my map, i.e. at the left/right edge (needless to say this is usually of minor importance).

Helvick,
I have the same problem, the second movie works fine, the first doesn't. Gives me some kind of Google error page.

Fixed that. Oops. I'd checked that the link worked but didn't pay attention to the actual URL - it was linking to the page editor preview not the published file.

Yes, but unlike your highest resolution map, we have access to the CICLOPS one

It's amazing to think that that map is still only 60 km/pix resolution!

If you're going to fold your Jupiter map, be sure to set some time aside, and ask a few friends over to help.

Of course, there's always that problem of not being able to fold a piece of paper more than X times

Doug

This reminds me of the Jupiter movie released by CICLOPS a few years ago, at http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=92 (scroll down to "2D Interpolated Movie"). This is a great animation, however I understand that the original frames were constructed at about 2.5 times the resolution, since I had seen such a high resolution single frame from the movie on the JPL Photojournal site. So there's still some potential out there to make a widely available high quality animation on a cylindrical projection.

Ah nuts.

Seriously though that is a fantastic animation. When I was capturing the Jupiter rotation movie I kept thinking that what you really need for this is an actual moving cloudscape. Thanks for the link, it's stunning.

--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Toma B @ Mar 27 2006, 09:07 AM) </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
WOW!!!
5 years after flyby...

Cassini\'s Best Maps of Jupiter
[/quote]


Robert Mitchell, Cassini misssion manager, made some interesting comments about Cassini's Jupiter observations in a Von Kármán lecture delivered before orbital insertion. He said that a substantial amount of Jupiter data was languishing unread in storage.

He said in a joshing sort of way that he had embargoed further review of the Jupiter data until the instrument teams had submitted their cruise sequences. In a more serious tone of voice he said that the data were untouched because there was no funding for reviewing them.

It was just a passing comment. He could have meant that the data were lying around in the PDS waiting for someone to get around to reading them.

However, I thought that he meant that they were inaccessibly locked in raw transmission data for want of funding to extract them, so that even a scientist with time and budget to spare couldn't use them. (I gather that NASA doesn't routinely release the raw data, but it would be interesting to know.)

TTT (dunno why the quote is messed up)

Hello Bjorn,

I was wondering if there's any simple way to modify the colors of some of the Cassini Jupiter releases to make them appear like your more realistic color renditions?

Since I did my map from calibrated PDS images the details of the processing will be different but here is a quick and dirty way of modifying a well known image:

Replace the red channel (CB2) with a new synthetic image: CB1syn = 1.106251 x (0.774 x CB2 + 0.226 x BL1)
Combine this with the green and blue channels into a new color composite.

Modify the color balance of the color composite to make the NEB whitish by multiplying red with 1.022 and green with 1.095.

IMO this results in some improvement but the colors are not identical to my map. One reason is that the calibrated blue PDS images are darker than the blue image in this example so you'll need to vary the exact values of the parameters used when making CB1syn (probably increase the weight of CB2). When making the map I had to make a synthetic green color channel but it was close to the average of CB2 and BL1 so I didn't replace the green channel in this example (I think in the CICLOPS images the exact average of CB2 and BL1 is used for green).

I'm attaching the resulting image.

Bjorn - time to bitch slap the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4860912.stm

Doug

Thanks Bjorn for the expert advice. I tried this out on the latest Cassini map pretty much as you stated it and posted the result on my website. Any opinions for further adjustment? I'll have to try some telescope observations this spring to check it out.

http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html#JUPITER