Could have been a resampling artifact as the images were enlarged, in some cases by a factor of 10.

Looks less spherical to me. But not because it's rougher, rather that it looks oblong. Something with the processing of the image?

Looks kind of egg-shaped to me; a bit like illustrations of Haumea.

I hope an animation is released. The single frames are also a bit confusing - e.g. is the brightest spot in that one image spot the bright spot?

I've rotated the images to a slightly more familiar orientation, using Gerald's thumbnails as a reference:

Click to view attachment

Not *the* white spot, the text accompanying the images states that this is the previously unseen hemisphere.

Here are my identifications of the previously seen hemisphere:
Click to view attachment
The squashed or even egg shape is probably due to a combination of the oblateness of Ceres and the fact that we're seeing it partly shadowed (ie gibbous).

Even in this view we aren't seeing the White Spot. (Not to be confused with White Spot restaurant!)

That's the other picture, methinks.

I suppose a rotation movie will be posted sooner or later.

THE white spot, the Hubble one, does not appear to be in these images. It should be beyond the limb at the bottom left of the right-hand image.

Based on the previous literature and predictions, I was really expecting a Callisto-Europa kind of soft ice surface with minimal relief. I love it when nature proves the experts wrong, and this clearly is going to be a very exciting world to explore.

Seems like it, yes. It's easy to get impatient with stuff like this.

Yeah the Dawn Twitter says it's coming.

Starting to see the Mimas resemblance more and more. Considering the neighborhood, it's not too surprising!

A press briefing is currently scheduled for March 2. there will no doubt be some fun products ready by then . . . including the second full rotation sequence scheduled for thursday or friday.

It is interesting how each new view raises more questions. I'm still impressed that there is a hint of highlands/lowlands as a geological distinction to think about. New and notable for me this time is the suggestion near the equatorial terminator of the "two-spot" side of either a draping or smoothing function over some craters. The animations may clear up whether this is just lighting or a real characteristic that hints of possible internal causes.

The next observation is going to be more of a crescent, going from Paul's previews on his blog, correct? That's probably when a lot more relief is going to be visible (though also much less illuminated surface!)

Starting to look like a rocky mini-Callisto.

Gibbous or not, its looking decidedly non spherical, even non oblate spheroidal. I'm thinking Iapetus without the extreme albedo differences.
That cant be good for an active interior.

Still, wait, wait....

P

The latest views of Ceres, rotated and *VERY* crudely overlain with Phil's splendid HST map:

Click to view attachment

The previously released image was clearly enlarged by a factor of 10, but if the most recent one has been enlarged by an integer factor it's not obvious to me what that integer is. The Dawn Journal says that this observation is supposed to see Ceres 121 pixels across. Top to bottom, the visible disk is about 930 pixels, but that doesn't divide evenly. But if the disk width refers to the equatorial width, I could be convinced that it's been enlarged by a factor of 8.

Edit: Really nice work, Ian. It may be crude but it's pretty

With its saturation cratering which seems to include a few really big but relatively subdued features, the saturnian moon it reminds me of most is Iapetus (without the equatorial ridge and bizarre paint job of course).

EDIT: Ha! Synchronous comment from antipode. So it's not just me.

Thanks Emily! The color overlay may not be all that accurate, but for outreach purposes it really seems to engage folks, doesn't it?

Looks a bit like Oberon and Umbriel. Hopefully the RC2 pictures will reveal more.

It's okay for it to be nonspherical. Ceres is a fast rotator compared to Saturnian moons, so has considerable flattening. It could be in hydrostatic equilibrium (that is, its shape is what you would expect for the combination of spin and gravity that it currently has) as long as it is differentiated.

The initial impression from the earlier images, that Ceres has been seriously battered, is certainly being proved correct, but not only in the Southern polar regions, though given the nature of its nearby orbital companions, I guess that should have been expected. The "white" patches are certainly a mystery. My first thought was they were south and southwesterly facing slopes, where increased sublimation of the postulated sub-surface ice, had removed the darker dust/organic surface layer. But why only some slopes? There are plenty more raised crater rims and mountains which face the same way that aren't shiny. Compositional variations perhaps? All that impact activity has undoubtably churned up the surface layer.

There are plenty of terrain features that are not obviously impact craters. That may well be what they turn out to be, but I am wondering if we may see features like those that we have seen on 67P. One might expect them if there is an icy mantle beneath the surface. That semicircular depression spanning the equatorial zone, seems to have similarities with the large depressions on 67P, Imhotep and Hatmehit, which also lie in equatorial regions.

Will Pluto look like this? Maybe not, but Charon could well do.

I will now also be looking out for the Iron Chicken, the Soup Dragon, Music Trees and dustbin lids too.

(For those outside the UK, Norway and Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfsMZKwqw3w)

Really nice Ian....

Just looking forward to what Ceres has to tell us regarding a relatively low density body(wiki reports 2.077) that has not been subjected to tidal energy.
How much internal differentiation has occurred? And what processes have carved the surface once we get high res.

Just loving this!

Craig

I remember the pre-voyager days. Most folks expected all the moons to look like what we see at Ceres at this resolution. .
But the devil is in the details... really looking forward to high-res.

At this point, the albedo differences remind me of Vesta.

nice color rendering! color always adds real value. we should have a full spread of color filters coming through in a week or two.

Relation of the second RC1 image to "the" bright spot, animated gif:

I find these mound-like features intriguing:

Click to view attachment

It's still possible, though, that they are 'shadow tricks' made by craters combined with general variations of elevation.

This can happen to some degree. Here I've marked the same feature (map projected) under different light conditions:
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
In one image it looks like a roughly circular crater with a central peak, in the other like two valleys separated by a ridge.

No -- very, very well overlain. The color really stands out as associated with features we're just now beginning to see.

-the other Doug

Looking at Ian's provocatively HST-colored images, I notice a couple of things.

On each image, I have (very crudely, and in this case, I mean crudely) outlined some obvious linear features. The rather powerful impression I get, heightened by the color changes, is that the linear features are the edges of rather extensive mesa units -- or at least, large areas of outer crust that appear to overly the level of the adjacent, lower terrain. I see other examples of this elsewhere, but these are the closest to the terminator and stand out the best.

The right image is very interesting. Now, I know there is a lot of artifacting in these images due to their enlargement. And I know what that can do to an angled line. But the right-hand edge of the linear feature in the right image looks almost scalloped. Almost like the ridge is made up of the longest durned crater chain I ever did see. In support of the crater chain interpretation, the individual scallops don't appear to be all the exact same size, and have (albeit subtle) differences that make them look like actual depressions/scallops, not just image artifacts. I say that with full understanding that the mind can put together blurry images and see things that aren't really there.

In any event, there are obviously some very, very interesting linear features that seem, at this resolution, to be boundaries between different landforms, some of which appear to be higher than/overlying other terrain.

This is going to be one interesting exploration!

-the other Doug

Click to view attachment

Hmmm, looks a bit like some of the equatorial Fossae on Vesta. Is there a giant impact bullseye somewhere????

Edit: Are we looking down at the center of an impact basin in the first image? Im looking at that semicircular arc which seems to be roughly concentric to those 'linear features'

P

Yeah. I can almost imagine I'm seeing a series of splashes from a big basin impact. But there seem to be very clear boundaries between different strata of the ejecta.

-the other Doug

the semi-circular feature in the first picture reminds me of the Moon's Sinus Iridum

I believe the image here has been enlarged by a factor of exactly 6, as you can see by counting pixels between steps on the jagged left limbs. (Count pixels over as many steps as you can and divide by the number of steps.) This gives a disk size very close to the expected 121 pixels for the original image.

The image here appears to be the 6x oversampled image zoomed further by approximately 30% (because bigger is always better ), hence the odd final ratio. You can tell by zooming the former by about 30% and comparing: the jagged aliasing artifacts are exactly the same.

*headdesk* Why would anybody do a thing like that? I feel a major rant about the value of original pixels coming on...

Thanks, fredk, for noticing the 6x oversampled one -- I hadn't stumbled across it yet. That's marginally better.

I know when I have had images used by various print media, they always throw a fit about the DPI of the image (unable to comprehend the fact that there are only so many pixels in the image, as if I'm holding something back). So my guess would be someone in media relations noted at the last minute that there needed to be more pixels in the image to satisfy this.

After rotating the image 50 degrees I got almost exactly Emily's 8x for the equator diameter in PIA19056.jpg. Although the diameters of the two images aren't exactly the same, but seem to differ by a factor of about 1.018, probably due to different distances of Dawn from Ceres during an approach of 10 hours.

Well, 6x1.3 = 7.8, which is close to 8. But if you want to recover the original-resolution images as best as possible, you should subsample the 6x image by 1/6th rather than the 6x1.3 image by 1/7.8 or 1/8. With a good choice of subsampling algorithm and choosing the origin properly with respect to the 6x6 = 36 possibilities, you should be able to get a reasonable result.

I think the dark spot with nearby apparently rayed craters is the feature informally named Piazzi from HST observations.

http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2001/ceres.htm

Phil

(PS great image, Ian!)

Click to view attachment

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/herschel/ceres-graph-pia17831/
The diagram above strengthens you are probably right - although a diameter of 250km is doubtful as mentioned in one source.

Region A should be this mysterious 'White Spot' we are all waiting to appear in RC1 (or tomorrows RC2) image gallery.

Wondering if the bluish areas could be from recently exhaled water vapor?

Very nice work.

Eventually an additional grid with longitudes could be helpful to compare with earth bound data.

Interesting map comparing HST albedo features and an OPNAV1 pic in this article:

Thanks Ian for the colour overlay, really helps.

That first image seems, as others have suggested, to have a huge flooded crater basin smack in the middle of it, looking similar to a lunar mare. The linear features seem to be a bit like waves or ridges propagating outwards. If there is a sub-surface ice mantle a vast lake of liquid, or at least fluidised material, would have formed after such an impact, making such wave like formations a possibility. The UV absorption of that dark grey area surrounded by bright patches makes you want to think there is water ice involved here to lend support to this notion, but that may be straying into wishful thinking terratory. From this view no sign of similar formations to the North, but elevations are "washed" out by the lighting, more pics needed.

Its getting exciting!

A couple of items from the new image release. First, Ian that is a great job of overlaying color. It really made some things stand out.

For instance, could the white spot be a high angle of incidence (near 90 degrees) impact? The ejecta is the dark blue-ish material that is then fanned out in a vacuum and with Ceres rotating underneath. So the dark material is younger than the large nearby impact basin in this scenario.

Click to view attachment

Secondly, has anyone else noticed the formation off the left edge of the second released image? I've attached a comparison between the first image's left edge and the second image's left edge. I think it's greater than 1 pixel wide so I don't think it is an artifact. Certainly it could be a crater rim just coming into view. Or a small plume, perhaps? Probably not but it's worth a little speculation.

Click to view attachment

Andy

Thanks, everyone, for your kinds comments about the color overlay! This paper on the Keck near-infrared observations of Ceres makes for interesting reading in light of the recent images from Dawn:

http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2008/04/aa8166-07.pdf