Beautiful mosaic of the Voyager mountains

Jul. 6, 2008 | 14:15 PDT | 21:15 UTC

One of my favorite amateur image magicians, Gordan Ugarkovic continues to play around with the amazing data recently released by the Cassini mission, covering the Iapetus encounter of last September. Here's a lovely mosaic he just put together of the Voyager Mountains. You can see my puny effort at this mosaic, using just the raw data, here -- but below is what happens when an artist gets his hands on the real data.

Just after its closest approach to Iapetus on September 10, 2007, Cassini focused downward to capture a six-frame color mosaic of the "Voyager Mountains," a line of peaks first spotted in images from the Voyager spacecraft as a series of white spots marching along the equator into the dark terrain. The data was released to the Planetary Data System in June 2008; here, amateur Gordan Ugarkovic has assembled the mosaic, in color, and overlaid it on a wide-angle shot taken at the same time to provide context. The color is slightly different between the narrow- and wide-angle mosaics: narrow-angle is IR1- GRN-UV3, while wide-angle is IR1-GRN-VIO. The mosaic is shown here at half its full resolution; visit Ugarkovic's Flickr photostream to download the full-resolution version. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / color mosaic by Gordan Ugarkovic

To remind you what the flyby was all about, you might want to check out the preview story I wrote back in September.

More at www.planetary.org