I like your new avatar, volcanopele!

(Maybe you should change your name to volcanotvashtar )

--Emily

I'm blown away, seeing that plume rising above the edge of Io, to me, is the most dramatic picture I've seen since those first pictures from Huygens. Seeing the glowing eruptions on the night side of Io during an eclipse, simply breathtaking.

Absolutely remarkable, and all from a flyby!

A nice series of pictures just added to the SOC site, showing the night side of Io just beside the limb of Jupiter
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg

Here is another cool one:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/view_obs.php?i...osure=93%20msec

Obviously the Tvashtar plume is quite prominent at upper right. You can also see the Prometheus plume on the dark limb at center right and the plume over the northern Lerna Regio eruption near the terminator at bottom. Also near the limb you can see the bright material surrounding Ra Patera and "Carancho Montes", an 8-km tall mountain chain northeast of Ra Patera.

Bellissime, Paolo!
The 3 exposures are taken with increasing integration time, only in the first one Jupiter is not oversaturated (...solarized!? ).
Here I crudely merged the first and the last in order to have a "High Dinamic Range" image (Io details are enhanced):
Click to view attachment

Something in this image is a Dejà Vue...
Click to view attachment

Here is my attempt at a composite plus some color:

Click to view attachment

cool, VP... well done!

A lot of nice Io images are now up on the LORRI raw images page. I think this may wrap up the Io images except for some eclipse observations.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg
This image shows Loki and Ra Patera at high phase angles. Note their forward scattering properties. At Loki, this is likely due to a glassy lava surface. Compare with this Galileo image: http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/io_i...2ISLOKI__01.jpg . See also http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg for a VERY shiny Loki.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg
Europa and Io

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/l...0x630_sci_1.jpg
Is Thor erupting too?

Whoah -- that glassy surface is really cool. I hadn't been aware of that charateristic of Ionian paterae before. Thanks for pointing that out, VP!

--Emily

This appears to be all she wrote WRT Io images from New Horizons (LORRI images anyway), though there are some eclipse observations left to go. I want to congratulate John Spencer, Jeff Moore, Alan Stern, and the rest of the New Horizons team on planning and returning such a wonderful dataset, and I want to thank them for making these jpegs available on the web. Looks like there is plenty to work with, particularly with plume dynamics. I certainly echo John's statements at the press conference, that it will be sad to no longer see new images show up.

The final version of time-lapse movie from New Horizons can once again be found:
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/Io_movie.gif

Here are a few looks at the images that showed up today:

Here is the Io/Europa conjunction, with combined MVIC and LORRI data:

Click to view attachment

And it does look like the Thor plume was active during the New Horizons encounter, with a much smaller plume than was seen and flown through by Galileo:

Click to view attachment

Wow... the time-lapse movie leaves me speechless. Truly. Awesome.

So now we actually have specular reflection but from Io rather than Titan?

Ditto. Thanks to Alan and the NH team for taking us along for the ride. And thanks to VP for volunteering to be and doing a great job as the UMSF Io Tour Guide.

If you have been following the main Jupiter encounter thread, you know that some of the New Horizons data has been uploaded to the PDS. This includes data from all instruments, not just LORRI. For Io surface science, the most important instruments are LORRI, MVIC, and LEISA. I have made some headway playing around with LORRI and MVIC data. LEISA, well, the data is there, but the time being it is beyond my skills to manipulate. I can view but I have no method for trying to pull out hotspots from that stuff (other than Tvashtar, which glows like a beacon, that volcano sure is a ham... ). Anyway, here are the two color views I have been most looking forward to, and I will leave it at that.

For the record, the color data is from MVIC, with LORRI providing the greyscale high resolution data:

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

The left image is from Ishine1 and shows a portion of Io's Jupiter-facing hemisphere illuminated by Jupiter. The MVIC filters used are blue (for blue), red (for green), and NIR (for red). The right image is from Initemon2 and shows Pele in color. The MVIC filter used are blue (for blue), 50% blue-50% methane band (for green), and the methane band.

You've got to warn people before posting pictures like that


Doug

<clink! clink! clink!>

THANK YOU for that second Io pic... that is simply stunning... serious case of acne that poor moon has...

Hope you won't mind me showing that pic in one of my school talks next week, the kids'll love it!

..Deleted.

A few comments:
1) in the first image, Emakong Patera is a little further to the north, directly between Prometheus and Sigurd. The feature you labeled as "Ekhi Patera" is actually Arusha Patera. Ekhi is to the northeast.
2) The feature you labeled as "Amirani" in the second image is actually Shango Patera and the new lava flow that has formed to the south of that volcano. The feature you labeled as "Maui" is actually Amirani. Itzamna Patera is also labeled incorrectly. It is labeled correctly in the first image.

Who deleted that post with the pictures?

He (3488) did. For some reason he wanted to delete all his posts and leave.

Doug

...okay, I was wondering what was going on, too. Pity.

hmmmm... he seemed so enthusiastic for a while there. ditto pity.

In conjunction with the publication of "Io Volcanism Seen by New Horizons: A Major Eruption of the Tvashtar Volcano" in Friday's New Horizons @ Jupiter special issue of the journal Science, several images have been released based on figures from the paper. The first, located at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePho.../100907_10.html, shows a montage of images taken of the Tvashtar plume, including an HST observation from before the encounter, several high-resolution LORRI views of the plume, and a series of images taken at 2-minute intervals. The LORRI images reveal filamentary structures that can change over a very short period of time as they descend from the top of the plume back down to the surface. The appearance of the plume is consistent with non-ballistic trajectories of the dust particles within the plume (caused by interaction between the dust and gas in the plume) and with the dust being created from condensation of gas at the top of the plume [N.B. the lack of a central eruption column, a la Prometheus].

The second image, located at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePho...s/100907_9.html, shows a montage of eclipse images. Eclipse images acquired by LORRI revealed a number of hotspots caused by active volcanism on the surface, auroral glows (note the glowing atmosphere allowing you to see where the limb is in the eclipse data), and other glows. Included in the "other glows" are fields of bright spots near the sub- and anti-jovian points. Comparing the eclipse data to a visible basemap, these bright spots correspond to volcanoes. Because these spots are not seen by the LEISA instrument, it is thought that these glows are not caused by thermal emission, but are instead caused by gases over the volcanoes becoming excited by Jupiter's magnetosphere. It is still possible that these volcanoes are the site of current or recent volcanic activity, but the thermal emission that produced is either too small or too cool to be detected by LEISA (keep in mind that LEISA does not see as far into the Near-infrared as NIMS did, so older hotspots may not be detected by LEISA. For example, a 200K hotspot, corresponding to a cooled flow that erupted 3.5 years ago (assuming a 10-m thick flow with basaltic composition), might not be detectable with LEISA, but it might lead to an enhancement in SO2, which would be seen in these LORRI eclipse images.

The third image, located at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePho...s/100907_8.html details activity on the surface of Io, as plumes, surface changes, and hotspots are marked on this map.

Also, the slides from John Spencer's presentation here at DPS yesterday are also available on line. Those are located at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/1...essGraphics.htm.

I've put a page for New Horizons' Io observations. The images are kept in 16-bit PNG format.

http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/New_Horizons/

That is really neat! Is this now the complete set?

Very cool. I like the colorised versions, even if the color is a bit outdated!

No I still got a few more to go. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through.

An excellent resource, Jason, thanks very much for it. A question -- do the settings you selected for the Unsharp Mask tool have any basis in characteristics of the camera, or are those settings just what made the images look subjectively the best to you?

--Emily

It was subjective. That, and it was the settings Unsharp Mask was at when I started up Photoshop. Looked good enough to me, so I kept it.

When I ran a mailing list once, an angry boss used a member's email account to email the list and ask all of us to stop sending that naughty employee so many non-work-related emails. Avocation battles vocation. And then there's the angry wife with the rolling pin...