ROSETTA NEWS: COMET 67P IN COLOUR
by Hazed
Speaking of Rosetta, the story isn’t over yet. The mission controllers and scientists are still going over the data transmitted by the probe and lander and one thing they have produced from it is the first colour image of comet 67P.
Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up, because the picture isn’t exactly in glorious Technicolor. This comet isn’t rainbow-hued. In fact, it’s mostly grey. Looking at the picture (which you can do at the source link below), you’d hardly know it wasn’t just a black and white image.
What’s interesting is the extreme lengths the scientists had to go to in order to produce this colour image. Images were taken using three different filters: red, green and blue. The idea was that they could then be superimposed to show a proper colour image.
The problem was that the comet was rotating, and Rosetta was moving, so the three filtered images didn’t match each other exactly. Painstaking work was needed to eliminate the effects of the slightly different perspectives, and get the images to match up exactly. That’s why it’s taken so long to produce the final image.
Shame the colours all turned out to be fifty shades of grey.
Source: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/12/12/comet-67pc-g-in-living-colour/
