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The Saturn Fly-By
Jamie noted that today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is actually a video of Saturn built by compiling actual photographs taken by Cassini in 2004. Unlike most videos of this type, this isn't actually 3D animation, these are the actual photos (albeit "digitally tweaked, cropped"). Great views of the planet, as well as Titan, Mimas and Enceladus.
I couldn't get the video to play at the link in TFA. But this one did: http://vimeo.com/11386048
Excuse me, I need to pick my jaw up off the floor.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
It's a space station! Or was I the only one who noticed? @~1:34
It's a bit more. Each original picture was used as the base of a very short sequence (basically, anywhere from a dozen to a hundred frames), with all the work being done in linking each still into the entire sequence.
The magic is that it appears seamless.
ftfa,
Do note that several thousand layers of many Cassini photographs were animated to make the fly-through work without any 3D CGI. The saturation is off due to lack of Flash Player ICM support.
The initial article makes a similar statement. These are photos that have been taken by Cassini over the course of its tour of Saturn. The artist has made the effort to color match, light match, image match the thousands of shots to create the final product. From what I read (and yes, I did read both the articles) this has not been an easy process.
For myself, I am blow away by the beauty of the universe ,and the minds that not only put Cassini there to take these images, but the mind who could seen them pieced together. The only thing better would have been to be in a spacecraft that could fly around Saturn and show me even more. Simply beautiful.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
by how beautiful that was.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I don't quite understand the trajectory of the probe. For example in the last shot, it swoops past Mimas zooming straight toward the Saturnian surface, then appears to change direction curving vertically, passing through the rings (why no hail of ice damage?), then swoops back around and turns around heading toward Encledatus at top speed. How is this even possible?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn
You have a spacecraft flying through the rings at a minimum of several thousand miles per hour taking relatively low resolution photos (they don't have a Canon 1DS mk III or Nikon D3X with macro lens on board and can't stop the probe to take a perfect edge-on shot of the rings). Besides, I suspect that when you actually approach the rings up close enough to use a macro lens it would be very disperse, nebulous, much like when you walk up to a dense cloud bank on a mountain and as you approach it, it appears to vanish, even though when you are some distance away it may look opaque, and if the light is at your back, it will be very reflective.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I think the majority of the problem is that we are accustomed to seeing atmospheric effects in lighting. Space doesn't have that, so your light genuinely is a single point-source. The images thus look like what you would get from simplistic point-source renderers, with sharp shadows, no diffusion and no ambient light, which causes our minds to classify them as fake.
Cassini passed through the gap between the F and G rings.
Not a sentence!
I can't believe that Slashdot is so uninformed as to believe this tripe (oh wait I can... sssiiigghhhh). This is a 3d animation, with photos from Cassini used as source. During the big zoom-in around 1:30, not a single pixel of the planet moves. Those massive storms blow quickly, the planet was rotating, etc etc.