Proteus

This is a collection of images from Voyager 2 of Neptune's second-largest moon, Proteus. The ancient surface shows huge craters, as well as many smaller impacts. In the highest resolution image, there seems to be lineated terrain below the giant crater on the upper terminator of the 418 km in diameter moon.
The sequence of images shows the irregular shape of Proteus as it rotates during Voyager's approach, ending with the "bad tooth" image. To its right is a super-resolution view of the bad tooth image. The color data is Green-Blue-Violet (GBV), and is color shifted to attempt to compromise for the lack of an orange image. Clear-filtered data was used to improve the grayscale in the image. This GVU image is the only resolved multispectral coverage Voyager obtained of Proteus. Taken from 870,000 km, it is the second highest resolution image set of Proteus.
The last image is the the lone, high resolution image of Proteus, taken from 146,000 km, and has a resolution of 1.35 km per pixel. We are left to wonder at this dim, fuzzy glimpse of this intriguing world. The short exposure to reduce smear, combined with the low illumination levels at Neptune, and Proteus' low albedo (6%) conspire to make the signal-to-noise ration very poor. Indeed, the whole image covered by Proteus only varied by six level of gray! Still, it is our best glimpse of Neptune's second largest moon. The color is based on the "bad tooth" image. It is interesting to note that this irregular moon is similar in size to Miranda, Mimas, and Enceladus.

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Use of these images requires permission of the author. tedstryk@gmail.com