Emily Lakdawalla • Jan 02, 2008
Mimas and the F ring
I checked the actual brightness of the pixels in Photoshop, to see if it was true that the core of the F ring has the same brightness all the way around, and I got a surprise. Where the F ring crosses space, the pixels have values of around 100 out of 255, which is fairly dark. But where the F ring crosses Mimas, it's actually brighter -- not darker, as my brain is trying to convince me -- with a value of about 120 out of 255; there must be some light from Mimas leaking through the dusty ring, or maybe the image compression bled some light from adjacent areas into the narrow stripe of the F ring. Shows you what my brain knows.
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