[meteorite-list] OT: TITAN MOVIE

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue May 24 23:31:29 2005
Message-ID: <4293F162.F6E27DBD_at_bhil.com>

Hi,

    This post has almost nothing to do with current list topics, no eBay
sales, no chondrules, and no Klingons (unless they have an outpost on
Saturn's moon Titan), so as long as the OnTopic topics are such stuff,
I'm going to post an OffTopic topic.

    ESA put all the raw imagery from the Huygens descent up on their
website (also NASA and UofA) for all to see, but it will be months and
months before we see processed images. There are the images taken with a
660nm-1000nm filter, with the DISR (Descent Imager / Spectral
Radiometer) experiment on board Huygens during descent and after touch
down on Titan.

    But of course, there are lots of people who don't like waiting for
months and months for processed images, so a variety of individuals have
started in processing the data themselves. It's sort of turned into a
Titan OpenSource Image Project!

    Here is a website that has discussion of the images and the
processing and links to many processed images:
    <http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens>

    There are many very well done stitched panoramas and colorized
versions. There's one guy that has converted the radar altimeter data
into a 3D model of terrain and texturized it. All kinds of fascinating
stuff, if this is the stuff that fascinates you.

    Far down this page there is a link to an animated GIF of the landing
site photos. Well, I thought that was pretty silly. I'd been to the
ESA site and paged through hundred of shots taken after the lander
landed, and it's the same picture over and over and over again. Why
would anybody animate it?

    But I downloaded it (it's pretty big) anyway, watched the movie, and
you know what? There's things going on in that movie. At first, I
thought they were registration mistakes, so I loaded it into a GIF movie
editor and checked. The images are perfectly registered, so there is
some kind of activity on the surface of Titan so subdued you'd never
notice the small changes from one frame to another.

    I assume it's weather. Since the photos cover a long time period,
it's like a stop action movie, as if you were taking a series of
pictures of a slow process like a flower opening, which we'll all seen.
It's hard to describe. For example, there two places where a "rock"
(probably ice) suddenly acquires a light patch which seems to slip off
the "rock" to one side. Is that methane slush falling on the ice-rock,
melting, and sliding off?

    Things (meaning changes of grayscale) slither around on the
"ground," in channels. Is that running methane? Many of the "rocks"
change their spots as the movie progresses. There are all kinds of
things going on in there. I'm still watching it...

    At any rate, it was fascinating to me that these exciting (because
they exist) but dull gray pictures suddenly become the experience of
sitting at a table in your home watching on a computer screen a movie of
the weather on another planet! (OK, ok, it's a moon, but it's a
biggie!) You want the Weather Channel for where?

    Here's the url of the movie:
<http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/huygens1.gif>

    There are dozens of other neat images on this site, too, of course.
And here's another site with more Titan images and links to still more:
<http://www.beugungsbild.de/huygens/huygens.html>

    And, as a footnote, let me advise you against visiting the ESA
site. It hands you a killer tracker cookie that I find highly
suspicious. It was in my computer for about 8 hours before I discovered
it had "called home" 53 times already, presumably reporting every URL I
had visited to some nasty minded little server somewhere. I consider
that ill-mannered behavior and ungenteel to boot, and that's why I shot
it dead between the eyes, pardner. My spyware called it a high risk
bastid, and that's why I done it, he said, blowing the smoke out of the
barrel of his six-shooter...

    As near as I can tell, the Weather Channel doesn't cover Titan...


Sterling K. Webb
Received on Tue 24 May 2005 11:30:43 PM PDT