Why are Huygens photos so fuzzy?

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Nomen Nescio - 19 Jan 2005 22:10 GMT

Theres a lot of chatter on the photo newsgroups about the apparent low
resolution of the images coming back from Titan.

Are these first images going to be later enhanced with more digital data
returning from Cassini? What type of encoding was used? Are they .jpg or
what?

I don't know if jpeg2000 was invented yet at the time of launch, but jp2 is
amazing. It compresses to 1/10 the size of regular .jpg and the images are
just as good! jp2 might be the best kept secret in computing because I've
only run into it once on the binaries. It takes a special viewer to decode
them because its not built into Windows and I have no reason to explain
this.

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Brian Gaff - 20 Jan 2005 11:16 GMT

Well, I cannot see them, but they are mostly composites and not processed.
As they only had a couple of hours of life, then I'd imagine there was some
form of compression.

Brian

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graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
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> Theres a lot of chatter on the photo newsgroups about the apparent low
> resolution of the images coming back from Titan.
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
> them because its not built into Windows and I have no reason to explain
> this.

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Henry Spencer - 20 Jan 2005 17:08 GMT

>Theres a lot of chatter on the photo newsgroups about the apparent low
>resolution of the images coming back from Titan.

The main reason for relatively low resolution is simply that the probe's
radio system did not have the high data rates needed to send back lots of
high-resolution pictures in the time available.

>Are these first images going to be later enhanced with more digital data
>returning from Cassini?

No, what we've got now is all we get.

>What type of encoding was used? Are they .jpg or what?

I'm not sure exactly what Huygens used (bear in mind that it was
originally slated to launch in 1995, so it was designed with about 1990
technology), but the general fashion in such things is schemes similar to
JPEG but not exactly identical.

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"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert | henry@spsystems.net

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Space Forum / Shuttle / January 2005

Why are Huygens photos so fuzzy?