Today, we downloaded the images from Space Telescope Science Institute: this means we transferred them over the Internet from a disk in Baltimore, Maryland, to a disk attached to Heidi's work station at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This took about three hours! They are big images! But most of the image is just sky. The pictures on the LHST web pages were clipped out to show just Neptune.
Heidi also installed a new disk on her computer, to hold the new data and the work that we expect to do over the next two weeks. While she was doing that, Wes reviewed the work we had done the last time we were together, which was just before Christmas.
We took a quick look at our new images - they're great! The first thing we noticed was that the clouds were very different from the way the planet looked in September. The general banded structure (the stripes, like on Jupiter) look pretty much the same, but the brightest cloud is now in the south - not the north! That was a big surprise.
We have a lot of complicated work to do, both on these new LHST data, and the other data. So we made a To-Do list, and here it is:
During the next few weeks, we will keep you updated on our progress as we work.
