The Voyager Mountains, Iapetus

Filed under pretty pictures, amateur image processing, Saturn's moons, Iapetus, Cassini

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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.

NASA / JPL / SSI / color mosaic by Gordan Ugarkovic

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.

Copyright holder: Gordan Ugarkovic

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about September 10, 2007