PSK RESEARCH
Main Menu => Science, Astronomy, & Physics => Topic started by: Psk on March 01, 2015, 11:23:23 PM
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Dwarf planet/asteroid Ceres is shining two bright lights at a NASA spacecraft & our scientists are unsure what they are.
Ceres, is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, officially designated as a dwarf planet.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres ahead of a March 6 rendezvous. The picture was taken February 19, from a distance of just under 29,000 miles, & shows two very bright areas on the same basin on Ceres' surface.
Previous Dawn images from further away showed a single light on Ceres, which was just as mysterious. Then, the one light turned out to be two as the spacecraft got closer.
"This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, in a NASA statement. "The brightest spot [of the two] continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres."
We'll find out more as Dawn approaches Ceres next week and more imagery comes in during the next 16 months, according to NASA.
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Even when the Dawn spacecraft was still pretty far away from Ceres, it was regularly taking photos every day, & NASA was releasing them within 48 hours.
I find it very odd that as soon as the lights in the crater photo was released, that suddenly there are no more photos of Ceres, even though the spacecraft has gotten a lot closer, & the photos would be much more spectacular.
I guess they need lots of time to touch-up the photos so they can say there was nothing there, & place the rest in a classified file that won't be seen for 100 years.
Anywho, I get some more, clearer pix of Ceres but no newer ones. These weren't released to the news, but only to a few research facilities & universities. I had to dig around to find them. You've seen these on the news, but not these exclusive clearer versions.
Enjoy!
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I have some more new pictures of Ceres, including a few closer & alternative views of the mysterious white spot. Once again, these were processed from the raw images directly by me & my own homemade software. You won't find clearer views of these same raw images anywhere unless they stolen from me.
Enjoy!
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I've gotten the latest Ceres photos. I've super-enhanced the mysterious "white spots", the "pyramid", & the "A" in the crater so you can better draw your own conclusions. I've also add the few color pictures released of Ceres. They were very poor quality, & 1 set of color images is in conflict of the other set. The colors & color patterns are entirely different for the same areas in 2 different sets of photos. Surely they can't both be true color & accurate, because they're both entirely different even though both sets were release by NASA as "true color" images of Ceres.
If appears the one set of color photos are nothing more than someone had taken the colors from a Hubble image of Ceres, & just overlaid them onto a lousy burrry B&W probe image. I believe it is the most accurate color, but not precise or clear. In the other color set, it looks like someone just airbrushed the colors in, by making their best guess, & didn't do a very good job at it either.
Many of the newest photos were only in 8 bit. Wow, it's 2015, & they used 1987 image technology for their newest image releases. So the strangeness of some of the quality had nothing to do with my enhancing, but that NASA just doesn't want to release many good quality images to the public. Most of them looked much worse before the enhancements, but the enhancements do show more clearly, that NASA deliberately messed up the public images.
This first B&W image is of the famous letter "A" in a crater. In my enhancement, it looks like a natuaral phenomena, & not a structure. However, there are a few other interesting things in the photo. The image was tinted the same color as that area is when viewed with the Hubble telescope.
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More Ceres images
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More Ceres images. Lots of bright spots in the last frame.
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More Ceres images
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Strange tiny very dark rings, circles, & dots show up around Ceres. They're darker than anything else on it. Alien flying saucers?
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Now onto the famous pyramid on Ceres. As you can see in my enhancements, it's just a mountain, 3 miles high.
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Mountain, bleeding white stuff. Ice volcano? You see a nearby new fresh crater with white stuff ejected too.
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Finally what you've all been waiting for. New enhanced images of those mysterious white spots in the crater. In early images one can clearly see right angles & rectangular objects. But in the newer photos, there are no more rectangles. Could the shape of these things changed over time or did NASA alter the photos?
I used various enhancement methods, contrasts, tints & zoom settings to get a lot of differently enhanced views of them.
In these, they look like the spots are on the tops of mountain or tall hill tops. Could we be looking as ice volcanoes inside the crater?
The core of Ceres may not be hot enough for lava, but it may be warm enough to melt methane, water, or cause CO2 jets. As CO2 hits cold space, it would fall back down as CO2 snow. A meteor impact can also melt undergound ice.
The ground is very dark in this area of Ceres. Any white ice or snow would appear super bright.
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In the first frame, I turn down the contrast & brightness even more. This way you can see the dots on the right aren't very bright at all compared to the main large one to the left.
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They released more images of Ceres, including the light spots. Looking at these newest images, there's lots of light areas on the astreroid. We can assume there's ice or salts just under the surface.
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The light spots are suspected of being ices or salts oozing up from the ground. It may not be water ice. It's cold enough there for methane or similar compounds to be liquid & freeze. Also, with almost no atmosphere, whatever the fluid is, would quickly evaporate leaving salts & minerals behind that were dissolved in the fluid. In the picture below, you can see slightly lighter patches when it may pooled, flowed, streamed in the crater.
Also in the picture, you can see near the top center of the crater wall where it appears to be collapsed & a mud flow seems to flow in. So this white stuff may also be oozing out of the flow, & flowing into the low spots of the crater. Another interesting feature is the dark spot on the opposite side of the crater, but no impact crater at the dark spot. So it's like a spray of dark material or dust sprayed out of the crater, & it fell back down there. It may also be plant or fungal growth fed by whatever is going on at or near the crater. Another interesting note is the spots appear to change shape & brightness over a few weeks, so whatever it is, it's an active area. That dark spot wasn't there a few weeks ago!
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They released some more close up pictures of Ceres. Just a few - could they spare them? More of the same kind of stuff, but no more of the spots in the crater. Maybe we have to wait until they airbrush & touch them up rather than release the real pictures. Once again they blurred the closest shots, so I enhanced them. So these actually show more detail than the originals.
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Although I'm certain they've taken tons of pictures or Ceres over the past month, they only released 1, & it looks like just a slightly higher resolution of a previous one.
If we have a space mission where one of its primary pieces of equipment is a high end camera, & one of its primary missions will be to take lots of pix, I'm always very suspicious of what they're doing with or to the pictures, if very few are released, or they're poor quality B&W images like ones we can take with a $10 pocket camera from the 1960s.
Anywho, here's the only image of Ceres released in a month, enhanced by me. But I can't confirm that it wasn't retouched, or touched-up like most NASA photos. If they didn't touch-up, or alter the pictures, then the shape & brightness of the spots have changed dramatically since the early pix were taken.
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Close-up, pushing enhancements to the limits.
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I've enhanced some more images of Ceres. In this set I concentrated just on interesting features & objects, rather than a little bit of all the pictures. Some of these were posted before, but I used different enhancements so other features stand out more.
Enjoy!
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What the heck is that triangular domed thing on the left side of the second picture?
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The dark objects in the last 2 images appear in all the early images of Ceres of those areas, but are mysteriously missing in the newer images. Did they move or were they airbrushed out?
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More mysterious objects on Ceres. However, the last 2 pictures I believe are imaging defects rather than real objects.
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On the way to Ceres the Dawn spacecraft made a flyby of the asteroid Vesta, & took some pictures.
Here I enhanced a few very interesting & strange pix of Vesta.
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With the closest approach to Ceres yet, they've released more pictures. Why is it that the closer the probe gets, that the worse the quality of the pictures get, or they don't post any of the most interesting areas up close? And I swear some of these "new" images, are just their old images that have been modified. Go back to some of the older images here. Don't they look better than the "new" closeup ones, & don't some of the "new" ones look like the same image, just cropped, flipped, or modified? I have many detailed images of the spots of Ceres that I posted months ago, that show much more detail than their "new" closeup images of them.
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In the last image of the white spots of Ceres, they false colored the image of a B&W old image, blurred, & distorted it. Why would they do that, & why do they withhold almost all color images of Ceres? I know they have color images, because NASA said Ceres has almost no color, so we don't need the color images. Why not post the color ones anyway, & let us be the judge? Didn't tax money pay for this stuff anyway?
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Here again they release, "new" closer than ever images of the spots on Ceres. Why do they look blurrier, & distorted compared to the old ones? The white spots are washed out so no detail can be seen in them too.
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They released some very close-up pix of Ceres. Unfortunately, they seemed to skip over the most important areas,
& released a lot of bland B&W images. Perhaps they're being withheld until they can be touched up & airbrushed.
Before you roll your eyes, NASA, & the ESA openly admit that they edit, touch up, or air brush almost all images from space before they're released to the public.
Anywho, here's the best ones so far. You can see much bigger, blurrier, colorless versions of these at their website, but you won't see as much detail as in our exclusive digitally enhanced versions.
Enjoy!
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BTW, these were all B&W photos of the asteroid, Ceres. I used the color from the few color photos of Ceres to tint the corresponding areas the same color in the B&W images.
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We have some more new, & enhanced images of Ceres.
Enjoy!
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You won't see these clearer or sharper anywhere else due to our unique image enhancing software. At the NASA sites they do have them bigger, in blurry black & white.
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In the B&W photos, I've tinted them the same shade as the same areas appear in the color photos. So in images that everything appears the same color, it's not true color, but the color of the general area in larger color maps of the area (they're here too).
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The wide angle color photos of Ceres, like in the second picture, is where I used the reference color of the same area to tint the B&W images.
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In the second image we're seeing the full globe view of Ceres in true color... both sides of the asteroid, stretched out into one picture, that's why it looks so oval.
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