sixpenceee:

Jupiter’s moons, as seen by Cassini

The comments offer an interesting example of how Tumblr posts accumulate folklore.

Yes, it’s Cassini that took the source images, even though Cassini was known mainly for its ultimate destination, Saturn. It did an earlier flyby of Jupiter (and before that, Earth and Venus — twice!) on its way there.

Kevin M. Gill made this video, which is technically more of an animation, since he made it by using a small number of source images and shifting elements to create interpolated frames. You can spot the artifacts if you look closely near the moons, which are Io (the reddish one) and Europa.

More here: https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/1054422462312570880

https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/1054422462312570880?s=21

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/619787745858125824.

A view no one has ever seen before: Saturn’s complete disk, separate from its rings. It was created by Croatian software developer and amateur astrophotographer Gordan Ugarkovic, who combined a 3×4 mosaic of raw Cassini images taken October 10, 2013.

More details from Emiky Lakdawalla’s blog at the Planetary Society: One for the history books.

The more I look at it the more cool things there are to notice: The hard-edged shadow on the rings (because the sun doesn’t subtend the half-degree of arc that it does from the Earth and Moon, leading to an ever-so-slight gradation at the edge of lunar shadows from the partially eclipsed solar disk). The hexagonal feature at Saturn’s pole. The illumination on Saturn’s night side from the ring itself, and the way it fades near local midnight (because of the planet’s shadow on the rings) and near the equator (because from there the rings go edge-on and disappear from the perspective of an observer on Saturn’s surface).

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/64301192221.

ikenbot:

Saturn’s Hexagon

This is a view of Saturn’s north polar region, taken by Cassini’s Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) on February 26, 2013. You can see the rings in the top of this image as well as its mysterious hexagon. — Val Klavans

It wouldn’t shock me if sticking cameras in clever places turned out to be the apex of human ingenuity. And it kind of would surprise me if we came up with anything better during what remains of my lifetime.

Good job, little robot. You’ve made me proud.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/45310066233.