"Starting Work on the Nepturne Images"
Heidi Hammel - March 22, 1996 Planet Advocate for Neptune |
This is Heidi and Wes, writing from MIT on Friday afternoon. You already know me
(Heidi) and Wes Lockwood is a scientist from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. We
have worked on Neptune data analyses together for many years. The next series of journals
will document how we analyze the new LHST Neptune images. These will be analyzed right
along with some of our older images, taken in 1994 and 1995. Much of the processing is
the same, and we hope to include the LHST images in the paper we are writing about
Neptune right now.
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:
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