Titan Image Processing

N.Wu, J.D.Caldwell
Dept. of Physics & Astron., York Univ., Canada

Session ID: P5.08   Type: poster

Abstract:

Titan, one of the satellites of Saturn, is an interesting object. For example, the column abundance of its atmosphere is ten times greater than that of the Earth. Images of Titan by the Hubble Space Telescope are very small in size and have very low spatial resolution due to its great distance from the Earth. In a PC II image, Titan appears to be a disk having a diameter of approximately 20 pixels, and the pixel size corresponds to about 290 km at the center of the disk. Therefore, in order to extract information from these images, special methods of image processing are required.

These methods include:

  1. Image restoration using the Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Entropy Methods.
  2. Image enhancement by subtraction.
  3. Image morphological processing.
  4. Dithering.
For each of these methods, the problem addressed, the basic idea of the method and the computer programs (mainly in IRAF/STSDAS and IDL) used are described, and results are presented. Both success and failure are reported so that our experience may be shared by others and help the design of observation of Titan in the future.



Patrick P. Murphy
Wed Sep 11 14:59:29 EDT 1996