What do you mean, I spend too much time on Saturn?

[fivemack]

Okaaaay ... draw a couple of points around the fully-illuminated limb, solve for the circle that passes through them best, estimate the diameter of Dione as 575 ± 10 kilometres using the optics specification, unwrap the map from spherical polar coordinates to cartesian, construct an enormously-blurred negative image and alpha-blend it in to remove the phase effect, and we have something resembling a map of Dione. I'm really impressed that the craters actually come out circular.

Next: get actual latitudes and longitudes for the features from here,
get a Voyager-era map marked up with the location names and figure out which crater is which, at which point I should be able to deproject the larger images, even the ones which don't show a limb.

Unfortunately, I can't convince myself that the Voyager-era map (the place names are mostly from Aeneas) and the deprojected map show the same planet. Maybe the crater pair in the top left of my map are Romulus and Remus.

There are moments when I wonder if I might have ended up in the wrong job, but I'm sure astrophysics gets as tiresome as civil service with long exposure.

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's my translation...

The big pale "C" on 'your' map is the furthest-right white marking on the UCL map; the lower leg of this is Padua Linea.

The biggish crater with a central peak, all the way over on the left-hand side of your map with about a third cut out of it, is Amata, and the two below (and a bit to the side) are Catillus and Coras.

It might help to look at this (http://www.solarviews.com/raw/sat/dionecyl1.jpg) image, too; the key for me was seeing the big crater in the curve of the top leg of the 'C', which is very prominent on your image.

Does that seem to work? It seems the bulk of your image is the "smooth" hemisphere, which makes crater-matching tricky... you might have a couple of the chasmas over on the right side, but I can't match enough detail to be sure.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

It's identical, in many respects - ask purplecthulhu (seriously).