Saturn In All Its Glory

The Bad Astronomer writes "On Oct. 10, 2013, the Cassini spacecraft took a series of wide-angle pictures of Saturn from well above the plane of the rings. Croatian software developer and amateur astronomical image processor Gordan Ugarkovic assembled them into a stunning mosaic (mirrored on Flickr), showing the planet from a high angle not usually seen. There's a lot to see in this image, including the rings (and the gaps therein), moons, and the planet itself, including the remnants of a monstrous northern hemisphere storm that kicked off in 2010. It's truly wondrous."

Comments

Any sign of the Fithp?

[rossdee]

Can you see Thuktun Flishithy ?

About that hexagonal polar vortex...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time anyone mentions Saturn's hexagonal polar 'storm' they seem to imply that it's an unnatural phenomenon.

It's not, nor as unusual as some used to think. In fact they've recreated it in the lab with nothing more than a spinning table.
The speed and viscosity create oscillating eddies which interfere and create the polygonal shapes.

http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/04/saturns-strange-hexagon-recreated-lab

Re:About that hexagonal polar vortex...

[JustOK]

As long as he's in the space time continuum

Re:About that hexagonal polar vortex...

[Sockatume]

I think that "bizarre" and "natural" are hardly contradictory epithets. Standing waves the size of planets are awesome

Re:SATURN !! THE GOD OF WAR !!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

All right now !! The bringer of !!

Well, you can see the Hexagon quite clearly in this picture. They sure can show off their bigger defense budget.

No stars

[cyberjock1980]

ZOMG There's no stars. This must be a NASA staged event and didn't really happen... on the moon.

The Fly-by Movie

[umafuckit]

For fly-by movie assembled from Cassini's images see here: http://vimeo.com/11386048

FAKE!

[Chelloveck]

FAKE! Come on, this thing is obviously 'shopped like crazy. The shadow on the rings is much to crisp compared to the shadow on the planet. Plus the ring shadow is entirely opaque. To make it realistic they should have given it some transparency so you could see the rings faintly behind it. Also, there's color banding in the "planet", and some weird hexagonal artifact that looks like this thing was originally rendered as a 3D model with bad tessellation. Go back to drawing Tippy to get into art school, you pathetic hack.

Re:SATURN !! THE GOD OF WAR !!

[Greg01851]

Mars is the God of War. Saturn is the Roman God of Agriculture ;)

Popularity of space stuff based on replies

[Quakeulf]

It seems that the trend her on /. is to reply less to space-related posts, and rather indulge in trivial online debates over something that happened on Facebook and whether or not choice is a good thing for Android.

This disheartens me. I have logged in again after a long period of inactivity to state my interest in space-related posts here and I would like to see more of that and less of trivial drama that may or may not be related to stuff that matters.

I am prepared to be downmodded for this but I am a willing martyr to get the point across.

Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies

[umafuckit]

It doesn't help that there is now so much light pollution that most people have either never seen the Milky Way, or see such skies so rarely that they haven't had a chance to become personally anquanted with the night sky in any real depth.

Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies

[umafuckit]

Alright. You got your +5. Now what do we actually talk about?

For starters, we could discuss how many of the features seen in the image are visible in a small telescope and how to go about seeing stuff. This is supposed to be a curious, techy, crowd. I'm surprised the small telescope question comes up so rarely on stories such as this one. In fact, quite a lot is visible on Saturn: major storms, cloud bands, rings, at least the most major ring division (Cassini division), shadow of planet on rings, shadow of rings on planet, coloration in rings, change of ring tilt during Saturn's year, half a dozen of the brightest moons (the largest of which can appear as a tiny disk). A lot of people here have kids and might like to show them this stuff to pique their interest. Saturn won't be easily visible in Q2 of 2014 but Jupiter is becoming progressively more accesible (rises late right now but earlier each night) and there's loads to see on it: moons, eclipses, loads of storms (inc. great red spot), rotation of the planet is very fast and quite evident over a one hour time course, etc. It appears much larger than Saturn and changes all the time, with even whole cloud bands appearing and disappearing over periods of months. You don't need expensive gear or dark skies to see this stuff.

Other than that, we could also discuss the hexagon, as mentioned by a link placed by a previous post. Of course there's also the stuff you mention, but that's not so directly related to this story. Not that this should discourage the topics, of course.

Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies

[argStyopa]

^beat me to it.

I was simply going to post:
Climate change: 8957 posts.
Android app about sex: 3692 posts
Republicans are poopy heads: 1244 posts
Post about an absolutely stunning image from a brilliantly-designed massive probe doing amazing work in the depths of space at LEAST a light-hour away from our planet: 34 posts.