Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Titan in 1995

Details Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Titan in 1995 Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Titan in 1995

Sep 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.2015c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #20.15; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1132

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

Titan has been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera in 5 separate visits over a total of 7 HST orbits of the Earth during September and October, 1995. The goals of the 1995 observations were: to fill in gaps in Titan orbital longitude coverage from 1994 observations; to monitor possible temporal change between the two years; to search for discrete features on Titan over a wide range of filter wavelengths; and specifically to obtain the images in such a way as to maximize the spatial resolution during analysis. In the PC, Titan has a diameter of approximately 20 pixels. The pixel size is about 290 km at disk-center. To optimize the information from the images, special methods of image processing were used, including: image restoration by Maximum Likelihood ("Lucy") and Maximum Entropy ("MEM") methods; image enhancement by subtraction; image morphology processing; and dithering. We used software mainly found in the IRAF/STSDAS and IDL packages. We address two specific planetary findings. The first is the brightness variation from center to limb in various filters. In all cases, the apparent sense of the variation is limb-darkening. However part of the apparent darkening very near the limb is due to smoothing by the instrumental PSF. In the case of the special methane filter at 889nm wavelength, deconvolution shows that there actually is limb-brightening over much of the disk. There is a real variation of the amount of limb-brightening with position angle around the disk, because of the north-south hemispheric asymmetry of the atmosphere of Titan at this wavelength. The second finding is that, at 673nm wavelength, there is a discrete cloud feature covering a few pixels in some of the images. We have investigated its spatial characteristics.

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