Assuming the globes

here a forward/back animation (1200 pixels) of rectangular roughly map-projected versions of the 20-frames OpNav7 sequence PIA19064.gif, aligned to the DLR RC2 map:

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/"Gerald")

Album of individual projected frames (1440x720 pixels).

Well, it appears that the ratio of an area 3.7 kilometers in diameter to one that is 1.3 km across is about 8.1 to 1. I'm assuming that albedo is inversely proportional to reflective area. If I'm not mistaken, one could multiply the old albedo figure of 0.4 by the 8.1 ratio to get the minimum new albedo.

Albedos greater than 1.0 are very rare in nature.

... Forth-back animation of polar projections of OpNav7 (same globes assumed as above) :


Album of individual 1440px maps.

If this were a geologically recent active region, wouldn't a reasonable expectation be that the crater floor is smooth as the material flows or falls onto the floor? It's hard to tell whether the crater floor in the zoomed-in version is itself cratered or those are image processing artifacts.

My money is still on a shallow angle impact causing the center bright spot with a secondary impact causing the second spot. It also explains the variability in brightness between different viewing angles.

Andy

It probably depends on exactly what you mean by "resolved". There's certainly not much detail visible in both of the two spot 5 subspots, but I would call them "resolved" in the sense that they are clearly larger than the PSF. Both of the subspots are elongated, and the orienation of elongation rotates with Ceres. This means the elongation can't be due to bad optics (eg, astigmatism) and almost certainly not due to motion blur during the exposure. Similarly, it is extremely unlikely for pixel noise to conspire to produce elongation in both subspots rotating consistently with Ceres's rotation, even though we're looking at only a small number of pixels here (ie, S/N looks good judging from frame-to-frame consistency).

It appears that the fainter subspot (upper in my animation below) is composed of two "sub-subspots" (again, the consistency from frame to frame argues against pixel noise). The brightest subspot (lower in my animation) perhaps also consists of two sub-subspots, the lower of which appears first and the upper which brightens. As others have pointed out, these sorts of brightness variations could be simply due to variable geometry of exposed surfaces/shadowing.

Click to view attachment

I'd assign the apparent split of the fainter spot to a more or less concentrical topographical feature in the crater. So it's not necessarily an albedo feature, but possibly an "inclination" feature.

But the upper double spot only brightens as you go from frame to frame. If the dark gap between the two sub-subspots was due to inclination, the dark gap should have been more prominent in the earlier frames when the illumination angle was lower.

Of course the real problem is that we're arguing over only a few pixels here. One way to improve things while we wait is to note that the spot 5 crater remains at roughly the same distance from the limb in all the frames, ie we're roughly "looking straight down at the north pole". So the viewing geometry for the crater is roughly constant. So someone could usefully do a poor-man's superresolution by enlarging (say 4x), rotating, and then stacking the images...

I recall when only one bright spot was discernible in this crater, then there were two. There was apparently no claim that the spot had been optically resolved at this point. When Dr. Russell says that the spots are not resolved because they're too small, I'm inclined to rely on that, given his expertise, and knowledge of this particular situation.
It does not appear to me that the brighter of the two spots is even separated into two distinct parts, which seems to argue against any reasonable definition of the word 'resolved'. The variable lighting of portions of this spot could have any one of several explanations. The bright spot sometimes appeared to be elongated in the images, long before there was any thought that it might be optically resolved.

ADMIN NOTE: Everyone - I think that we can drop the discussion over the word 'resolved'. You can go into the 'micron' scale and still not fully "resolve" an object. Let's just wait for better images that will help to identify the nature of these features. Not long now.

as one can see in the second attached image in post # 41

Click to view attachment
it is on a west facing slope


as to the other one
WE WELL SEE --- once there are better images

In the previous image, and also in the animations showing this region, I'm tempted to say that it's not ejecta that's so bright. This "spot" is resolved to the point that, when not saturating the ccd's, it looks like a pyramidal structure (in shape, not at all suggesting it was artificially constructed) that is definitely lighter in color than the surrounding terrain. It doesn't exactly follow the curves of the crater wall it seems to overly, either.

I'm wondering if this could be a constructional landform -- looks a little like a volcano-like structure in this image, at any rate.

Boy, it'll be nice to get better pictures of these areas. Patience... I must learn patience...

-the other Doug

Well found for the analogy Scalbers!

I've extracted a portion of the Voyager Moutains and the bright patch of Iapetus, about 5 km long, looks like the bright spot of Ceres... to a certain extent!

That animation really helps.

I'm seeing (imagining) something along these lines:

Click to view attachment

The main bright area seems to be in the western part of a little depression of some kind, with the brightest material not becoming visible until the shadow clears the slope.

(Nothing in the drawing is necessarily to scale; plus, I intentionally left out the other bright spot(s).)

Here's a slightly different take on this sequence of images. (Click to enlarge)

A heavily zoomed and exposure enhanced version of the first 3 frames of the bright spot. (this may have introduced artifacts - but overall it allows a better overall visualization IMHO)

I think the these frames clearly show the outline of a crater with the far wall getting the first bit of sunlight. As the sun rises in the crater the crater gets more and more illuminated causing pixel saturation and bleed for the subsequent not shown images, but roughly corresponding to the crater dimensions.

[click to animate the GIF]

Click to view attachment

Is there any speculation on what would be able to leave such a smooth, shiny depression? To me, it appears that much of the crater may be a similar make up because as the sun angle decreases, the crater continues to light up. Seems to be smack dab in the middle as well. Possibly a remnant of some cryo-gyser sort of blow out maybe?

well as of the 19th
the Dawn spacecraft would have gotten a good view of the area
Click to view attachment

and today the 21st
Click to view attachment

PIA19064, 4x magnified (probably bicubic), then polar-projected (bilinear interpolated) to 2880x2880 pixels, then cropped and registered, then pairwise averaged (stacked), sharpened, forth/back animated:
Click to view attachment

Is anyone else having issues with the released animated GIF not repeating/looping?

( http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/Ceres_bright...k_into_view.asp )

Yes, with (outdated) Windows XP / Chrome, at least.

Also the same with W7 / Chrome

it is a setting ON!!! the dawn web site !

THEY!!! have the gif set to "run once"

Yeah, must be. I had to clear my cache to get it to run again. Hopefully this will be noticed and corrected soon; meanwhile, let's all be patient.

Works fine (even on ancient xp) if you download the gif and play in, eg, irfanview.

I edited it to loop forever (click to enlarge):

Emily, great input. Like everyone here, hanging out for the hi resolution pics.
Anxiety level akin to Huygens.
We may actually be seeing a steady `volcanic eruption`.

It's said that when Dawn's mission is finished, they'll park it permanently in orbit of Ceres. A good thing they won't have to feed coins to De meter.

...aaaand, Dudley's banned.

That was a joke, Ceres is the Roman equivalent of the Greek Demeter.

Unless you were also making a joke about making puns on this thread. I guess the smiley was a clue.

It is rather unforgivable

It's just that I feel it's important to get some pun out of life!

Looks like the Dawn website just underwent a major overhaul...

dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

At first glance, I can't find where the "Where is Dawn now" simulated views have gone.

Yes. It looks like they've changed the user interface to be more tablet friendly, as many web sites are starting to do. Unfortunately, my primary web access (at work and at home) are desk tops, which aren't as user friendly as for these tablet friendly sites.

The "where is Dawn now" can be found by selecting the Menu button, then clicking (or tapping) on Mission. About a quarter of the way down the Mission page, you'll see "Where is Dawn now?" followed by a link labled "> View". Or you can just use this link here: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/live_shots.html

all this "portrait" formatting on LANDSCAPE 16X9 screens !!!
( a TON of sites are doing this so...)

makes one REALLY WANT some of the by-gone days of what sites USED to look like


Click to view attachment

nasa.gov 1996
http://web.archive.org/web/19961231235847/...//www.nasa.gov/

I really don't like this new trend. It's a fad among web designers - like the one a year or two ago where everything on the screen would flash and shake as the cursor moved over it. The most basic principles of good design are being thrown out of the window, mainly because designers need to keep changing sites or they are out of a job.

If UMSF goes the same way I'm quitting! Or at least I would if there was anywhere else to go.

Phil

A shame we're reduced to discussing website design, interesting though it is. I too prefer pages rather than the scroll-for-ever sites of today.

Anyone have any idea when we might see the next images, presumably there are some great shots since getting into orbit that we're not seeing yet?

I can't stand this shift to 'trendy' websites either....but I have had visibility into the process behind the redesign for many of JPLs pages...and I can tell you, the demand for it isn't coming from designers, it's coming from management.

And when it's winning awards all over the place - it's not going to go away any time soon : http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4566

with this getting off topic

i think most of us HAVE recently unbookmarked sites we used to use
Do to the now "handheld TELEPHONE !!!! " trend

but on a but of a different note
i DO find that the MOST useful sites ( content wise) look like this
Click to view attachment

a FTP page for the dawn spice kernels

New RC3 image is out at the photojournal: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19319

Think it might show one of the interesting big craters near the south pole?

Following up on that image, is the relatively crater-free area above the crater in this crop part of a massive landslide? Have we observed something similar on other bodies?



The crater floor also appears to be of a relatively young age.

It looks more like a massive ejecta sheet to me, and we do see those commonly on our own Moon. They are most often seen, on the Moon, as ejecta from large basin impacts. As a comparison, take a look at the Fra Mauro formation on the Moon's near side.

In fact, this resembles that kind of structure quite a bit.

-the other Doug

Since we're on the subject of website design trends/fads, I'm not fond of the 'load more'- or 'fetch more images'-style of display. After awhile, the browser chokes and dies before all thumbnails, posts, etc. can be viewed. Two examples of this on well-known sites:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ceres%20dawn

https://instagram.com/marscuriosity/

I guess I'm old fashioned, but I don't mind having to click 'page 2' to see the next 50 image thumbnails.

At least the image display formatting on the Dawn site is still 'old fashioned'.

---------

Ok. Back on topic:

That modified terrain around the large crater is intriguing. It does look like fresh ejecta, but from where?

I'm reminded of the old issue where webpages would break if they detected you were on a phone:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png

... now they apparently will just assume so.

Yeah - I usually get happy when I find something like this (SPICE kernels, IMG files or stuff like that).



I'm not sure about landslides outside of craters (and this may or may not be a landslide, it will be very interesting to see higher res images of this terrain) but of course big landslides inside of craters are quite common, for example I remembered this one on Iapetus: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06171

Reminds me a lot of the terracing on relatively fresh, large lunar craters like Tycho, so the stuff above it could be ejecta.

It really does look strikingly lunar.

I can't say that area above the crater looks like a landslide to me, but if it is, there is a very good precedent. Look at the lunar farside crater Tsiolkovsky... on its northwestern side, a massive and clearly delineated landslide or debris flow extends down into an older crater.

Phil

Another view of the southern hemisphere! http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA19321_modest.jpg

Compared with the north polar area, there seems to be a paucity of small to medium sized craters, but more larger craters.

Perhaps the viewing angle due to Dawn's closer proximity may have something to do with it.

More puzzling image release quirks: PIA19319 is reflected, as you can see by comparing the two new releases:
Click to view attachment

I don't see reflection between those two images.