Cassini's doing Iapetus encounter science now

I've been watching the Cassini raw images website all weekend, waiting for more Iapetus images to come down. The ones that are on the ground now are not actually part of the encounter science observation plan; they're all from fairly large distances, and were mostly captured as "ride-alongs" to observations being made by the CIRS instrument. As such, the pointing wasn't always perfect; apparently CIRS occasionally looks away from its target to black space for calibration, and some of the attempts that Cassini's camera made to photograph Iapetus were actually taken while the spacecraft's optical remote sensing instruments were pointed at black space. But there were plenty enough images to fudge together color composites from all the observations so far. There are five:

The Refresh button on my browser is going to get quite a lot of exercise over the next couple of days! Stay tuned, and I'll post images as I find them...