Thursday, September 08, 2011

Io from Voyager 2

I have never worked much with Voyager 2 Io images.  Voyager 1 flew much closer to Io, and Galileo of course imaged it from even closer and monitored its volcanoes over a period of years.  The Voyager 2 images are relatively distant.  Still, some of them are quite sharp and show Io from angles not seen by other spacecraft.  This image is made from some of the closest Voyager 2 images, taken on July 9, 1979 from about 1.1 million kilometers.   One can see a multitude of high mountains casting shadows near the terminator.   One can also faintly see the night side of Io illuminated by reflected light from Jupiter.


 This is an alternative version.  It improves the view of the day side at the expense of suppressing the night side.
 In this image, I worked to compensate for the fact that the filter coverage is different on different parts of the disk and several color filters are badly underexposed by the terminator.  I think it is the best looking version.


Here is an enhancement of the night side.  Because it is very faint, this image appears very noisy.


Processed Images Copyright Ted Stryk, Raw Data Courtesy NASA/JPL

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