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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."
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
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
ZOMG There's no stars. This must be a NASA staged event and didn't really happen... on the moon.
For fly-by movie assembled from Cassini's images see here: http://vimeo.com/11386048
soylentnews.org
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.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Mars is the God of War. Saturn is the Roman God of Agriculture ;)
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.