Close-Up Images Show Ceres' Bright Spots In Great Detail

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 9, 2015 @09:27PM from the pretty-pictures dept.

New submitter Actual_Alien writes: Since the Dawn probe arrived at Ceres, everybody has been wondering about the mysterious bright spots on an otherwise dark dwarf planet. New images sent back recently show the spots in better detail than ever — 140 meters per pixel. NASA used composite imagery to get high-quality exposures of both the bright areas and the surrounding dark areas. We can now clearly see a wide, flat crater with a rim that's almost vertical in spots. The brightest area is right at the center, with other markings to the upper right in the image. Dawn's orbit around Ceres also allows scientists to look at the crater from other perspectives, and they've generated a pair of animations to illustrate better what it looks like. One of them highlights the bright spots, while the other shows color-coded topography.

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It's the direction of the light. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-09 23:35 · Score: 2, Informative

We expect it to be coming from above. This seems to happen often with
nasa images, the light is coming from every-which-way.
If you rotate it 180 or 270 degrees it looks more like a crater.
Hmm... googling... jpegtran will do this for you.
jpegtran -rotate 180 ceres.jpg > ceresflip.jpg