Today's APOD is is an Extra Detail Magnification (or "EDM", for short) which has been obtained from a nice Contextual (or "CTX", for short) Frame (look, if you want, at yesterday's APOD), taken by the NASA - Dawn Spacecraft and that shows us a amall portion of the Mid-Latitudes of the Dwarf Planet named 1-Ceres. In particular, what we can see here is a funny-looking (and possible - better yet: most likely) image-artifact, which has been magnified in order to show you how, sometimes, some simple Image Defects can make us see things which, in fact, do not exist. Of course, we, as IPF, cannot be one-hundred-percent sure that this "Feature" is a true Image Defect, but its shape, visual configuration and color tell us that it cannot (---> should not) be anything else. You are obviously fully free to disagree with our (however humble and honest) interpretation. Even this picture was taken from an altitude of approx. 915 miles (such as about 1472,5461 Km) from the Surface, with a resolution of roughly 450 feet (such as about 137,16 meters) per pixel, on August 21, 2015. This image (which is a crop taken from an Original NASA - Dawn Spacecraft's b/w and NON Map-Projected frame published on the NASA - Planetary Photojournal with the ID n. PIA 19885 - Dawn HAMO Image 9) has been additionally processed, extra-magnified to aid the visibility of the details, contrast enhanced and extra-sharpened, Gamma corrected and then colorized (according to an educated guess carried out by Dr Paolo C. Fienga-LXTT-IPF) in Absolute Natural Colors (such as the colors that a normal human eye would actually perceive if someone were onboard the NASA - Dawn Spacecraft and then looked ahead, towards the Surface of 1-Ceres), by using an original technique created - and, in time, dramatically improved - by the Lunar Explorer Italia Team. |