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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.
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 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.
You're asking a forum full of nerds who collectively have seen Star Wars over a trillion times if we noticed that Mimas looks like the Death Star? Are you out of your gourd?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
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.