Ida and Dactyl in color

Filed under pretty pictures, global views, amateur image processing, asteroids, asteroid 243 Ida and Dactyl, Galileo

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Galileo took the three images for this enhanced-color view of asteroid 143 Ida and its satellite Dactyl on August 28, 1993 at about 16:30 UTC, about 20 minutes before its closest approach. Galileo was about 16,000 kilometers from the asteroid at the time

NASA / JPL / SSI / color composite by Emily Lakdawalla

The images have been resized to 150 percent of their original size. Three images of Ida taken through infrared, green, and violet filters were combined to make this composite view. In the time that elapsed between each frame, Ida rotated, so the green and infrared images had to be warped to match the violet-filter image in order for them to overlap. Only two of the frames contained Dactyl, and one of those was blurred, so the image of Dactyl here is actually composed only of data from the violet-filter image.

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 28, 1993