Saturn on August 20, 2012

Filed under pretty pictures, global views, amateur image processing, Saturn, Saturn's rings, Cassini

Go Back

Cassini captured the images used to make this color composite of Saturn on August 20, 2012. Cassini was on the southern side of the ring plane with the Sun in the north, so the opaque B ring appears very dark while the transparent A and C rings are lighter. The rings cast shadows on Saturn's southern hemisphere.

NASA / JPL / SSI / Emily Lakdawalla

Composed of images taken through red, green, and blue filters. Processing involved erasing cosmic ray hit blemishes with the use of the Photoshop Clone tool and adjustment of levels in individual layers to produce approximately true color.

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

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 August 20, 2012

Comments:

DonInMaine: 08/23/2012 10:19 CDT

Have you tried the spot healing brush in PS instead of clone? It averages local pixels without producing exact dups or streakiness. I recall your blog about the Chinese discovering a new PS crater.. I find it more even handed and less obtrusive, although still mucking with the data. For pretty pix, though, quick and easy.

Emily: 08/24/2012 07:18 CDT

I haven't. Actually I really haven't learned how to use very many of Photoshop's features added in the last several iterations. I keep meaning to get one of those "missing manual" type books -- but it's not like I'd have time to go through it! I'll try the spot healing brush next time.