JUPITER TROPOSPHERIC THERMAL EMISSION .1. OBSERVATIONS AND TECHNIQUES

This paper presents a new Jupiter data set and several new techniques developed for its reduction. A companion paper (J. Harrington, T. E. D owling, and R. L. Baron, 1996, Icarus 124, 32-44) uses these data to s tudy the scales of energy deposition into Jupiter's atmosphere. We obs erved Jupiter's tropospheric thermal emission at a wavelength of 4.9 m u m (1% bandpass) with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (Mauna Kea , HI). The ProtoCAM 62 x 58-pixel infrared array camera took a total o f 229 full-disk 3 x 3- and 4 x 4-image mosaics on 19 nights spanning t he period 11 Jan. through 19 Apr. 1992. Resolution was typically 0.5'' -0.75''. We obtained full longitude coverage on six nights. This wavel ength is sensitive to emission from the similar to 5-bar level, near t he top of the (putative) jovian water cloud level. Clouds located high er in the atmosphere attenuate this emission. The images show atmosphe ric structure at all resolved spatial scales and have a cloud optical depth range of similar to 4.6. We developed image processing technique s for finding the optimal registration of images in mosaics and for lo cating low-contrast planetary limbs in images of planets with many hig h-contrast features. Both techniques are new and generally applicable and require no human interaction. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.