Space is Cool
Posted on April 21, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 23 Comments
Damn, this is an excellent picture from the Cassini Saturn mission:
Saturn’s rings, the small moon of Epimetheus, and hydrocarbon-laden Titan, fuzzy in the background. Gorgeous.
There’s more where that came from here. I’d go look at them if I were you.
I’d go look at them if I were you.
That somehow sounds vaguely threatening. ;-)
AiWE = i am in awe.
Pictures like this prove that the real thing out sci-fi’s sci-fi any day.
I don’t need a supernatural context to feel awed and inspired. The natural stuff is perfectly sufficient.
I like to go here every day.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
Wow….just wow. those pics are amazing…
Cassini = rock star.
Gosh, science is cool.
I think my favorite is #14. There’s something indefinably striking about how Mimas just floats there above that vast featureless expanse.
They are indeed some awesome photos!
My day job is helping build the European satellites that can take these kinds of photos. Yesterday I was driving a Mars Rover!
Those are just jaw-dropping amazing…
unreal, but it’s not
Thanks for the nice stop on the cosmic tour bus.
Gorgeous photo, although if I were that moon I’d be kind of annoyed at being named after Epimetheus, who if I remember the myths rightly was a bit of a twit.
Checking in to see how bad the power outage was for you; the DDN site was pointing out Bradford as a major outage. Which, of course, led to a VMI of you working in the lab-oratory in full white mad doctor jacket, rubbing your hands over a keyboard, going ‘Muahahaha – my latest creation….I *throws switch* now Give! It! Life!’
Suddenly, the lights all go out in the whole county. And then the next one. And the next one. Aaaaand….
Sweet. Given that part of my novel takes place on Enceladus, it was cool to see it hanging there, just waiting for a secret base to be built on it 400 years from now.
Space-rocks! Space rocks!
Saturn truly is one of the most odd and beautiful beasts in this solar system. Probably my second favorite planet. I’m still unfairly partial to Earth.
That picture doesn’t look real to me. Why?
@17 Todd
I suspect the reason is that the actual object of focus in this picture appears to be Epimetheus (the tiny moon). Due to Cassini’s distance and the focus not being on the rings themselves, it makes the rings look a lot smoother than they are. If you look at some of the other photos in the article John linked to, you can see the imperfections in the rings that your eye is expecting.
That picture doesn’t look real to me. Why?
Too much porn? I’m told it has that effect. ;)
It’s a pity more SF doesn’t engage the fascinating new things we’ve learned in the last 20 or 30 years. I have high hopes for The Quiet War, though.
Photos like this make me happy that I work for JPL. The awesomeness knows no bounds.
kaellinn18 @18
A lot of that also depends on the part of the rings you look at. If I had to guess, that looks like the A Ring in the frame, which is pretty smooth in structure — you can see slight waves stirred up by the moons and the change on either side of the Encke Division (the big gap in the frame), but those are subtle. The Cassini Division, B Ring and C Ring (all interior to the A Ring) all have much finer structure, and tend to be pictured more to show that. The F ring has lots of structure, but it’s too narrow to see in this image.
All of the objects pictured are far enough away that the camera is focused at infinity. That’s generally the case for astronomy. Titan looks fuzzy because it is, not because of the camera — it’s got a very extended atmosphere.
I’m a grad student at Cornell, and work with Saturn’s rings, though not with the images.
I had to come back here for the ‘intellectual’ commentary that didn’t appear to exist in the comments below the pics… Thanks so much for posting… too cool…