I'm sure many of you saw this on Yahoo but in case you haven't, this is an actual photo from our Cassini satellite. It was taken with the sun behind Saturn which illuminated all the dust particles:
Amazing Saturn Picture
- Thread starter mitchconner
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Astronomical photos are almost always enhanced in some way.
And that one's a beauty, even for photogenic Saturn.
And that one's a beauty, even for photogenic Saturn.
The pale blue dot is in that photo somewhere.
Fascinating.
Astronomical photos are almost always enhanced in some way.
And that one's a beauty, even for photogenic Saturn.
Yep, exactly, and that's not to say that they're doctored, but rather there's a procedure for astrophotos called stacking and it's essentially taking a bunch of exposures and stacking them together and letting a program take the best parts from each and combining them into a single image, which usually results into better colour and more sharpness than you'd get from a single image. That's how most professional astrophotos are done. Sometimes they'll even take pictures using different filters, like infrared filters or hydrogen filters to capture different wavelengths that we wouldn't normally see, and then stacking them. I'm guessing this is what happened here and why the colours are pronounced. Also important is to note that a lot of these professional photos aren't even taken with traditional cameras, but rather CCD imaging which that telescope most likely has. They're sensors that are extremely sensitive to light.
Here's a good example of this:
http://www.rphotoz.com/astrophoto/tricolor.html
In each of the 3 black and white images shot using the different filters, you can clearly see what's more prominent in each of them. Combine them, and you get something like the image at the right.
And another example:
http://astro-photos.blogspot.com/2011/04/comparison-uvinfrared-cutoff-filter-vs.html
With the UV filter, you can clearly see it has more colour than the one that doesn't.
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Note: this was taken from the Cassini orbiter
Right. Another word for it is an orbital telescope, similar to Hubble, and that's what I was referring to, in case anyone was confused.
Well, telescope or not, my point still stands. The detail about what it is, is irrelevant.
Cool!
I bet V'Ger took some awesome pics.
I bet V'Ger took some awesome pics.
It's much easier to see in the larger images viewable on the page I linked above (and where you'll also find a brief explanation of the process by which the finished picture was assembled from many elements - very much like what Owain described), but the blue dot is right about there:
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It's both, really.
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