Nov. 23, 2015

PSI Senior scientist David O’Brien produced this mosaic that shows Ceres' Occator crater and surrounding terrain from an altitude of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers), as seen by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Occator is 60 miles (90 kilometers) across and 2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Occator is home to the brightest area on Ceres, which tends to appear overexposed in most images. This view uses a composite of two images of Occator: one using a short exposure that captures the detail in the bright spots, and one where the background surface is captured at normal exposure.

The images used to make this mosaic have a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel, and were taken during the first of six mapping cycles during Dawn's high-altitude mapping orbit.