A bunch of "amateurs" have put together some mosaics from the raw data returned by the Huygens probe. It looks to me that these are of far better quality than the official mosaics that have been released so far: http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens This site also has some links to the raw data. Just a personal comment: these pictures seem to be of pretty poor quality, reminiscent of the Mariner 4 mission's "old technology" pictures of Mars. I know the Huygens probe only had 8 kbits per second transmission rate with Cassini, but still...less pictures of higher quality would be better than the low resolution ones we've seen so far, I would think. A $50 web cam from CompUSA could have done better (I know, I know, let's see a web cam function properly at -288 degrees F). Perhaps better pictures will be forth coming once they get all their data processed.
Chris Russell wrote:
Just a personal comment: these pictures seem to be of pretty poor quality, reminiscent of the Mariner 4 mission's "old technology" pictures of Mars. I know the Huygens probe only had 8 kbits per second transmission rate with Cassini, but still...less pictures of higher quality would be better than the low resolution ones we've seen so far, I would think. A $50 web cam from CompUSA could have done better (I know, I know, let's see a web cam function properly at -288 degrees F).
Just a guess about the image quality. The text indicates that the Huygens images were taken through a 660nm-1000nm filter. The would put them on the red end of the visible spectrum extending well into the IR. Looking at IR weather images of Earth like those at http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_ir_west_loop-12.html they seem to have the same muted appearance. So maybe the Huygens images look the way they do because they are not centered on visible light. Again, just a guess. Patrick
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Chris Russell -
Patrick Wiggins