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You should also check out some of the images on the Cassini mission webpage:
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
and some of the animations, like the ones on this page: http://www.ciclops.org/view/7620/North_Polar_Movie

You should also check out some of the images on the Cassini mission webpage:
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
and some of the animations, like the ones on this page: http://www.ciclops.org/view/7620/North_Polar_Movie

There's a bunch of raw imagery up from Cassini at the CICLOPS imaging lab site here.

2) Unrelated, but what the hell are those things at lower left (and two of them crossing in upper-mid-to-upper-right)this pic from a more more sane 17000 km? Ridiculously long crater chains from ejecta, or something rolling/bouncing "downhill"? Seems weird that it could roll "downhill" through a crater without altering its path, so I'm leaning towards crater chains from ejecta, but they seem pretty wildly extended for crater chains, yet are too varied in direction to suggest faults. Where was this relative to the "tiger stripes"?

2) Unrelated, but what the hell are those things at lower left (and two of them crossing in upper-mid-to-upper-right)this pic from a more more sane 17000 km? Ridiculously long crater chains from ejecta, or something rolling/bouncing "downhill"? Seems weird that it could roll "downhill" through a crater without altering its path, so I'm leaning towards crater chains from ejecta, but they seem pretty wildly extended for crater chains, yet are too varied in direction to suggest faults. Where was this relative to the "tiger stripes"?

Icons of this. It shall be done.

Gorgeous, gorgeous.

http://www.ciclops.org/view_media/36124/Tethys_Rev_164_Raw_Preview_1

That's no moon. It's a space station!

The guys who made the movies released the clips (separately, no annoying music) here.

How about the original, direct route to the guys who made the movies?
http://ciclops.org/view_event/124/Cassinis_Holiday_Greetings

The rings are non-concentric at that point. Pushing the brightness levels to expand bright artifacts shows interesting "twisting" (look on each side lower on left, higher on right) The close-up views miss some details that a "big picture" shows, reductionism, feh.

We assume an orientation of the anomaly parallel to Saturn's axis, but from the brightness of the reflected light on the "dark side" of it suggests an angle maybe closer to that of the ring plane... remember where the sun is. Although, it could be illumination of backscatter from Saturn, or by internal reflections between the particles.

Ring particles could be caused to move by electrostatics, not just gravity or collision, so I'm thinking a long plasma trail behind a comet passing thru, or a slower moving (orbital?) charged object causing a ruction. Heck, why not a moving cloud of magnetic particles colliding with the ring bits, which are then drawn along Saturns magnetic field.

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

Thanks very much; that's a much better source of information than TFA.

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

I am involved with planning the Cassini mission and, in fact, helped plan the images in the current story.

Yet only now are we beginning to receive imagery of detailed ring structure.

You're starting from a mistaken premise. We've been getting detailed images of the rings for the entire mission. In fact, the highest resolution images of the rings to date (probably ever) occurred during orbit insertion at the very beginning of the prime mission.

Since the primary mission has ended it is apparent that obtaining detailed images of ring structure was never a priority.

Nope, rings is a major priority and drives the mission around 20%. (Depending on how you quantify that.)

All of the time has been spent on the moons, Saturn and relatively wide shots of the rings.

Again, blatantly false. Any time we're out of the equatorial plane of Saturn (as we are now and have been many times during the mission to date), we're studying the rings and the magnetosphere (and Saturn, but they tend to be a bit less insistent on this geometry). There are many close-ups of the rings available. Have you looked for them? They're all over at CICLOPS, if you do a search. Or even browse images, really.

Is resolving the ring constituents even feasible for Cassini?

No, we can't get close enough to resolve a 1-m body.

I can see from the flight schedule that close up passes of some sheppard moons will occur in 2010. Will attempts be made to image the detailed structure of the rings at this time?

Yes and no. At the time of flyby, we're in the ringplane and cannot see the rings very well at all. Near that time, I'm sure we'll take images of the rings. As we have always done.

I know the rings are largely particulate; a fog of ice particles.

Not the main rings, no. The main rings are ~30-cm to ~3-m bodies. And there is almost no way to get close enough to image these. It's not even a matter of risk, it's a matter of having to be far, far too close to what amounts to a solid wall of ring. And what good would imaging a few particles in one location do compared to destroying the spacecraft in the process? Apart from satisfying you need to see even closer up to the rings?

incidentally Carolyn Porco is now my favourite female scientist

A good link to provide for Dr. Porco is the imaging project she runs, CICLOPS http://ciclops.org/ , since it's a wonderful site and the project under her direction has produced some stunning photographs and fantastic discoveries.

But, and I say this having spent some time with Dr. Porco, none of that has anything to do with her being female whatsoever. She is not a female scientist, she is a scientist full stop. And a damned good one at that.

It's likely that her being female has affected her career path, but that is entirely independent of the quality of her work. So why continue to promulgate irrelevant aspects? Dr. Porco is Caucasian, why didn't you say that she's your favorite Caucasian female scientist? It's irrelevant. Dr. Porco is a scientist. And, if Dr. Porco happens to be your favorite scientist, I'd endorse that wholeheartedly, as she's one of my favorites as well.

In fact, it's called a "moonlet" in the original press-release: http://ciclops.org/view/5493/Tiny_Moonlet_Within_G_Ring_Arc

(Not sure why NASA's story linked in the summary doesn't use that title.)

The original story is at CICLOPS. (I spent all day Saturday helping get that stuff together.)

Original story is at http://ciclops.org/view_event/91/Great_Storm_of_the_South.

With apologies for pimping the hard work of my co-workers over NASA's copies of the release, the website that originally carried this is http://ciclops.org/view_event/89/Targeting_the_Jet_Sources.

More bits _DO_ help! With color calibration massaging 8-bit values for any one of the R/G/B channels, with only 256 possible input value and 256 output values, assuming it's doing anything at all you'll be suffering a many-to-one map. Certain output values never occur. This does lead to visible contours in the color-calibrated image, perhaps appearing as faint alternating green/magenta or blue/gold bands. Fine examples of this can be seen in Cassini images officially released at http://ciclops.org/ - but i'm not telling which ones, happy hunting ;-) Some of the raw data is 12 bits/channel (we laugh at only 30 bits/pixel, ha! ha!) and much easier to work with for calibration, enhancements and such without getting artifacty. Working with this stuff everyday gives us a good understanding of the value of 4 extra bits - and certainly even just two extra bits would be welcome where we could get them.

I imagine that while this new display may not be visibly better to the average visual duffer, those contours you get after calibrating 8 bit/channel data could be a problem in a number of specialized situation. Most important, though, is mainting 30-bit deep data all the way through the system from camera/3DCG/whatever to the final display.

What if.... decades ago, whoever decided that a "byte" is 8 bits had chosen 12 instead, and all the engineers followed along?

We did get some cool images, you know. Not as many as most flybys (blame Saturn blocking the Sun for two hours starting three minutes after closest approach), but still some very neat ones. http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=4865 This mosaic highlights the cratered terrain of Enceladus' north polar region. In addition, it should two areas on much younger terrain: Samarkand Sulci (which cuts through the crater terrain, disrupting craters along its margins) and youthful terrain on Enceladus' leading hemisphere (which has very sharp margins with the cratered terrain).

raw, unprocessed images here.

I was going to suggest http://ciclops.org/search.php?x=0&y=0&search=rhea which has quite a few Rhea images. (Now with less Slashdotting!)

With caption at http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1507.

Oddly, that image didn't make it into the options for the voting. (Candidates were largely nominated by visitors to the site, incidentally.) The black and white version of that image *was* in the voting, but only got 6% of the BW vote. Pity, because I agree that it's a really amazing view.

Since the data came from Cassini ISS and since we're the authors on the paper, I feel no qualms about suggesting visiting http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=73

Oh, this is perhaps a shameless plug, but a friend noted the need for some images to help understand the story. So here are the discovery images of the first four propellers found: http://ciclops.org/search.php?x=0&y=0&search=propellers

I would like to point people especially to the video at http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1702&js=1&navjs=1. Now, watch the rotation of the planet, then re-start the movie and observe the lack of movement for the jets. You can see for yourself that the jets are rotating across the planet rather than with it, presumably along the rilles. The video is rather undeniable. ... People, you will perhaps get no better opportunity to see for yourself that space plasmas can be highly electrical.

God, I must deserve a big helping of DEE-DEE-DEE, because I can't see much detail in that movie consisting of a whopping four (count them, 4) fuzzy, grainy frames*. Especially since I'll never get a better opportunity to see for myself that EU is undeniably true, and yet I'm not convinced. If EU has any elements of truth to it, then (as you so defensively gushed) it will win out eventually and you EU proponents will all be heroes. But all I'm seeing right now is a Richard-Hoaglandish theme: whining about being Kept Quiet By The Establishment(TM) while pointing out "amazing" and "undeniable" details in fuzzy images instead of writing serious scientific papers that include testable predictions.

*Note: I'm not saying those 4 frames convince me the NASA interpretation of conditions on Enceladus is "undeniably true," either. I'll be interested to see what turns up as we look at Enceladus over the years. But I know the professional scientific community is able to update its hypotheses and theories to match observed reality. Here's hoping the EU camp can do that too.

On October 1, 1820, Humphrey Davy swept into the laboratory of the Roayl Institution with remarkable news for Michael Faraday. While performing a demonstration before a science class, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted had noticed that an electrical current flowing in a wire moved a nearby magnetic compass needle. Whenever Oersted brought the compass toward the wire, something wrested the needle from its tenuous alignment with the earth's magnetic field and swung it in a different direction. Evidently, current in a wire creates its own halo of force -- later proved to be a magnetic field, not from an ordinary magnet, but from an electrical impostor. Oersted's observation confirmed what some scientists had suspected: Electricity and magnetism were fundamentally related. (This hunch was based on a philosophical stance that all forces are manifestations of a single fundamental force; scientists today are still trying to prove such a "grand uninified theory."

That no one before Oersted had observed the magnetic aspect of electricity may seem astonishing in retrospect, especially when battery-powered electric circuits were common in 1820s-era laboratories, and compasses had been around for centuries. True, the influence of a current-carrying wire on a compass needle can be subtle. (I've tried. It helps to wrap the wire several times around the compass to concentrate the magnetic effect.) But, more important, most scientists at the time had been educated (indoctrinated?) to believe that electricity and magnetism were distinct phenomena. In France, for example, where the ideas of the influential eighteenth-century physicist Charles Coulomb dominated the scientific community, electricity and magnetism were understood to be different fluids that do not interact with each other. After Oersted's announcement, physicist Andre-Marie Ampere lamented to a friend, "You are quite right to say that it is inconceivable that for twenty years no one tried the action of the voltaic pile on a magnet. I believe, however, that I can assign a cause for this; it lies in Coulomb's hypothesis on the nature of magnetic action; this hypothesis was believed as though it were a fact [and] it rejected any idea of action between electricity and the so-called magnetic wires. This prohibition was such that when [physicist] M Arago spoke of these new phenomena at the Institute, they w

You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.

You can get the press-release from the source at http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=57, if you so desire.

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The editors changed my story link. My original submission had http://www.ciclops.org/ which has not only the press-release but several supporting images which might be of interested. Granted, our server is feeling the load pretty badly at the moment, but that'll probably ease up in a little while.

Bad news, indeed, for those of us in Colorado! But it gets even worse when the altitude is one billion miles...

Another practical consequence for computing is processing images from spacecraft. We keep plenty busy wiping out the little buggers from Cassini images http://www.ciclops.org/. For some combinations of camera filters and imaging targets, exposures can be a few minutes long - those images are peppered with little white specks.

Would be interesting to see how the cosmic ray hit rate varies over time and distance - might be a good project for some post-doc. (Any astronomy post-docs out there?)

Its a shame each time Cassini is mentioned on Slashdot they ocassionaly forget to mention the link to the Cassini Imageging Teams Offical website. The link is here. Just so everyone knows... :-) Enjoy