raw data from Cassini

One thing we discovered this past academic year is that NASA Cassini took more than 300,000 images of Saturn's rings! Today I met with Maya Nesen (NYU) and Ana Pacheco (NYU) to look at Cassini raw spacecraft data. Nesen is working on the tabulated housekeeping data, giving the position and orientation of the spacecraft and instruments in various coordinate systems (that we are trying to work out). Pacheco is working on the raw imaging data from the imaging module. We discussed how to display the imaging so that an astronomer can confirm the the noise level and rough noise properties in the pixels. We discussed adjustments to our plots of the housekeeping data to aid in our interpretation of it. In particular, we looked at some of the camera-related meta data and it looks like the camera might have a few different zoom settings. I guess we have to read some documentation!

patches of imaging

I am discussing with Sean Ku (NYU) and Victor Kuang (NYU) the NASA Cassini imaging of Saturn. We want to make (from the data) a high-quality face-on picture of the rings. This is a problem (from my perspective) in computer vision, so we need a camera model (and a lot of other things). One thing I hypothesized about this problem today is the following (am I right?):

Any sufficiently small patch of a camera image can be modeled with a pinhole-camera-like camera model, provided that we give the camera model the freedom to make the image plane not perpendicular to the line from the pinhole to the patch of the image plane. Is this correct? We are about to find out, the hard way.