This is planetary radio. June is here with a very busy solar system summer soon to follow.

Welcome back everyone.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

What's the connection between an F-18 fighter jet

and cave diving in Arizona?

No, that's not this week's trivia question, but you'll still hear the fascinating answer

when we talk with astronomer Dan Durda.

Bruce Betts will have us visiting Venus for the real trivia contest later in the show.

First up is Emily, who can't quite get the color adjusted on her TV.

I'll be back in a minute with Dr. Derta. Hi, I'm Emily Lockwala with questions and answers. A listener asked, why do the pictures I've seen of Saturn's rings look blue-green or white in Hubble photos, but brownish from Voyager images?

The answer has to do with all of the different steps and electronic devices involved in the production and display of a planetary image.

To understand the source of the color differences, imagine walking into a large electronic

store.

You'll be greeted by a wall full of television screens showing the same vividly

colored images. But when you begin to examine the TV images more closely, you'll notice differences

in brightness, contrast, and color balance between the screens?

Some seem more red, some seem more gray, and so forth.

If you start adjusting the relative brightness of green and red on a TV set, you can achieve a very wide range of colors from realistic

to very unnatural. Of course, realistic is a subjective judgment. So how about planetary

scientists? Why don't they always go for realistic colors in their photos?

Stay tuned to planetary radio to find out. Dan Durta sure gets around. I mean that in both the physical sense and the intellectual

one. Dr. Durta is a senior research scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute.

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