Saturn In All Its Glory 75
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."
About that hexagonal polar vortex... (Score:5, Informative)
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
The Fly-by Movie (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SATURN !! THE GOD OF WAR !! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies (Score:4, Informative)
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.