18 Comments on “Whoa. Saturn, Man.”

1. Saw that this AM. Pretty amazing. It reminds me of the video for “Mea Culpa” from the eno/Byrne collaboration “my life in the bush of ghosts.” also the music remindse of the “Moon” soundtrack. File under creepy & cool.

2. Whoa.

   I recommend full screen for anybody who didn’t already.

3. Whoo, dizzy…

4. I had to stop watching the video after maybe a minute. I have epilepsy, and the images or lighting (sometimes both) were strobing too fast. Rapid strobing is a major seizure trigger for me.

   Glad everyone else seems to have enjoyed it, though!

   :-)

5. Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

6. I think Mr. Kubrick would approve.

   For those who didn’t get it, the “Cassini Mission” title card was exactly like the title cards in Kubrick’s 2001.

7. I think this’ll go down as one of the most gorgeous missions in the history of space exploration, at least until we manage to get a probe into, say, the Orion Nebula or something like that. Thanks for passing it on!

8. Best use of Nine Inch Nails music that I’ve heard yet. It’s perfectly suited.

9. @#7 Chris Gladis:

   M42, a/k/a the Orion Nebula, is roughly 1350 light years away from Earth. I hope that Futurama’s hibernation capsules both work and are not tended by Bender and Fry.

10. @#7

    Nebulae wouldn’t be that visually impressive to look at up close:
    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/04/26/what-does-a-nebula-look-like-up-close/

11. Really cool. I presume it’s not raw data, which makes me think of Galileo with his telescopes. He had to work out what it was he was actually seeing before he could begin to work out what its significance was.

12. And with the gorgeous music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as the mood setter, perfec’!

13. Several years ago, National Public Radio played the audio file of sounds. I was thrilled to see the link for it on John’s page “Saturn Speaks, on the human hearing range link.

    But…”Firefox can’t find the server at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.”

    Can anyone else provide directions to the human-audible version of the sounds?

14. Amazing video there. Great find and thanks for sharing.

15. Wow, that was slightly creepy (in a really good way). Beautiful too. Really made me feel the epic-ness of space around me; I love that feeling.

    Thanks!

16. @Jonathan Walker: It’s made from pictures off the Cassini raw images pages, which are raw data auto-converted into JPEGs by a relatively crude algorithm. Presumably the maker of the animation did a lot of work to get the images in the frames to line up correctly, but it looks like there’s been relatively little processing apart from that. The things people have been complaining about in comments as intrusive After Effects noodling (the donut-shaped spots, alternate-scanline dropouts, stray light reflections and flares, etc.) are actually artifacts present in the raw images.

17. Looks like the title sequence for a Titan-based remake of “The X Files”

    – yeff

18. Wow, anyone else get THE RING vibe from this?

    Am I gonna died in sevuh dais? :)