Experimental animation: the Great Red Spot

Turns out you can trawl through raw image data for Galileo, Voyager and other missions as well. So why not try to animate some Galileo collages of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? (warning: 7mb gigant-o-GIF after the jump)

Great Red Spot

As it turns out, the reason why not is because my motion interpolation plug-in chokes on the “seams” in the image. It was worth a try, though.

A stroll through the raw image archives of Voyager offers an explanation as to why there were only a few decent images from Voyager 2’s Uranus and Neptune encounters: it’s not that there are dozens of less interesting or photogenic shots of the two planets and their moons and rings. It’s that Voyager 2 was going so fast, and was battling enough hardware glitchery, that it was lucky to get the well-worn photos that we have been overexposed to. The imaging team worked wonders to get what they got.

And frankly, we need to send more modern vehicles back to these places to keep exploring and take more pictures.

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