Spectacular New Views of Saturn's Polar Vortex 49
sighted writes "Today the robotic spacecraft Cassini returned some jaw-dropping images of the odd hexagon in the planet's north polar region. The hexagon has been seen before, but the change of season has more fully revealed the feature in visible light. Cassini also zoomed in on the churning vortex at the north pole itself. The south pole features a similar maelstrom."
I want stereoscopic (Score:5, Interesting)
What an incredible image, I'd love to see it as a stereoscopic image to really capture the depth of the clouds. Shouldn't be too hard - at orbital speeds two images taken a few seconds apart should capture incredible depth while the storm is unlikely to have changed significantly.
Fractals !! (Score:3)
When I looked at the pictures I saw fractals.
Very very complex fractals.
Hopefully one day some brainy guy can come out with a 3D fractal program that can simulate this absolute wonder.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's pretty awesome in it's own right. Thanks.
weather (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's been wild here too.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't think you fathom quite how gigantic this storm is: Hint: The thing could swallow the whole earth like a tornado swallows a cow, or your mom swallows a cow.
Re: (Score:1)
I take everything in powers of 0, except 0 of course I have a limit there.
Re: (Score:2)
That may well be, but while the wind and rain were beating on the windows,
I had to comfort my girlfriend all night. Poor thing.
She does look perkier this morning tho.
"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing ... "
"
Pacman Returns (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of scientific research. It's a scientific article, which are almost always behind a paywall. ScienceDirect (operated by publisher Elsevier) is one of the largest scientific journal conglomerates. Universities pay 10's of thousands of dollars every year, if not more, to give their researchers access to these journals. So the authors make no money on it, but Elsevier makes loads on these articles.
Amazing pictures... (Score:5, Interesting)
See research done by Ana Claudia Barbosa Aguiar and Peter Read at Oxford in 2010. They were able to recreate this phenomenon in the lab. It has to do with interaction the rotating atmosphere of Saturn with a jet stream near the pole. By adjusting the speed of revolution of the jet stream they were able to create pretty much any desired shape.
When seeing such images, I wonder... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That will vary depending on if the ones who are to go see it are picky about making it back.
Re: (Score:3)
This is a pretty salient comment, although it's certainly possible to go to Saturn and back, the technical hurdles are pretty astounding and would require some substantial developments in a number of areas.
However, if there's no intention to make the return trip, humans could go as far as Saturn with existing technology.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure we can go to Saturn and back with existing technology - it's just a matter of being willing to pay for it.
It's not like it's impossible for us to park a few million or billion ton of rocket fuel in orbit (or however much is needed for a round trip) - it's just extremely expensive to do so.
Same with building a properly shielded capsule for the crew to be aboard.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, that does seem like it may take 3 or 4 years to get there.... Not sure anyone has ever spent that long in space.... It seems maybe with some artificial gravity (spinning disc?) it could be done, but then you have the problem of building a pretty massive ship that's still micrometeor and radiation shielded. It would probably involved something about 20x more complicated than the ISS and that's still not counting all the fuel. Rocket fuel is a diminishing returns problem, where carrying thousands
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If we told you we were sending you to Saturn and then stuffed you into an underground complex and simulated the ride, do you think you'd be able to tell the difference?
I think it's less about the physical journey from Earth to Saturn, and more about the.. life journey, for lack of a better phrase, of humanity as a species that would enable us to go there in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
This is an amazing image, but why isn't it in color?
Because color is for pussies. Astronomers use either plain gray-scale imaging, or, perhaps even more often, a set of filters to extract bands or wavelengths of interest. The problem is, all colors assigned to a filtered gray-scale image or a combination thereof are usually false colors, since they generally don't correspond to the sensitivity bands of the retinal cones in your eye. The false colors are often useful, but you'd complain the same ("the colors look weird!"). Fairly rarely do astronomers take a
Re: (Score:2)
...to use different parts of the spectrum and, like you say, maybe some parts that are not normally visible to the human eye.
It's not just that you can cover different parts of the spectrum than you usually see with your eyes. It's simply the fact that even if you use filters that do cover the RGB parts of the spectrum, but do it in a different way than the retinal cones, you'll end up - after reconstructing the image either in print or on an RGB monitor - with a picture that has distorted colors. Two different shades of green (as you see them with your own eyes) can end up looking identical in the reproduction, or the other way
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's because using telescopes on such a vast distances corrupts the colour. Remember, that the colours we can see, and appreciate are bound in to a narrow band of frequencies, and taking pictures on a single frequency make better pictures. Of course, you could do 3 distinct images, in the red, green, blue frequency bands, but by that time you make three photos, Cassini changes its position considerably, hence the photos will not cover the same angle. It's fairly big thing to get a single frequency band phot
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Only the Voyager 2 probe flew past Uranus, and I don't think it took pictures of the poles
Why do you say that? Given Uranus' axial tilt of 90+ degrees and the fact that Voyager 2 flew around it in a plane roughly parallel to the ecliptic, I'd say it would be a work for art for Voyager 2 to take a series of pictures of Uranus without capturing at least one of the poles at least once (that is, with an angle of incidence, say, less than 40 degrees). There was a summer solstice on Uranus' south pole in 1986, which means that this picture [wikipedia.org] should have the south pole somewhere near the center, or perha
Re: (Score:2)
topical (Score:3)
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/condescending-jupiter-meme.jpg [weknowmemes.com]
Wow (Score:2)
Gorgeous! Now... someone said something about a planet or some such? All I could see was the redhead.
Alien Base!! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A hexagon!? Clearly that has to be the work of intelligent beings.
Of course, what did you think? Even aliens need a Department of Defense.
Re: (Score:2)
The hexagon was placed there by the Kuiper Anomaly (cf. Stephen Baxter, "Coalescent")
Obvious explanation (Score:4, Funny)
There is a large Hex nut holding the poles together - and you call yourselves scientists?
Link to sequence of images (Score:2)
I have a list (Score:1)