Not much to say about this one but, wow. This is better than the famous hi-res Saturn image from early in the Cassini mission. The composite image was made by Ian Regan who is a freelance imager.
Image Processors on Flickr: Gordan Ugarkovic
Gordan Ugarkovic has a great collection of reworked Cassini images on Flickr. I contacted Gordan about showing some of his images here on wanderingspace and he was ever so gracious. As many people Gordan is “somewhat underwhelmed by the frequency the Cassini Imaging Team releases color composites”, so it is up to excellent freelancers like him to compile this information from the data files which are made public by NASA. Problem is that these images rarely make it to the mass media and we are stuck with the dozen or so color images the NASA imaging teams decide to produce in a year.
WALLPAPER NOTE: The left 1/3 of the “Three Moons” image was extended in Photoshop using data at the edges of the original image which was cropped to a square format. This “fake” imagery was only applied to that area of the rings and the rest of the image including the moons is actual.
Here are some other images from Gordan which are some of my favorites, but don’t trust my editing… go to the gallery and have a look yourself. For the sake of posterity I have added a permanent link to his gallery on the right side of this blog where you may note that there are already a few others linked. There were two additional ones but the sites have been taken down since I linked to them?! Hopefully the three left will stick around for a while and I will in time add more to the collection.
Tethys and Saturn’s Hazy Limb
Mimas and Prometheus on Rings
Io on Jupiters Edge
Wallpaper: Saturn’s North Polar Region
Currently the Cassini spacecraft is orbiting Saturn during Saturnian Winter unlike when Voyager sped by in the 80’s when it saw an almost globally peach colored Saturn. During this winter, the rings tend to keep the region in shadows and the theory goes that this lowers the temperatures and break up the peach colored clouds and “clear” the skies to reveal this blue. If this is the case, we are seeing deeper into the atmosphere here than we do in the areas blanketed by the more peach colored top clouds.
The image shows the northern pole of Saturn and those bands are the shadows of the rings on the cloud tops. You can see some smaller cloud formations in between the shadow gaps which gives a very alien Saturn some Earth-like familiarity.
Wallpaper: Saturn and Mimas
One of my favorite wallpaper images from the Cassini mission. This image almost looks like one of the fantastic Chesley Bonestell images from the 80’s only its not a painting. What you see are Saturn’s rings along the bottom and tiny Mimas floating across Saturnian cloudtops which are being shadowed by the rings. It is thought that these deep shadows, in addition to Saturn currently being in winter, somehow cause less clouds to form in Saturn’s northern hemisphere and create the blueish appearance seen here. When the Voyager’s passed by Saturn in the 80’s the entire globe appeared to be peach colored and lacked any of the blues you see today.
IMAGE NOTE: The left 1/5 of the image (the rings) is a digital extension of the image data found near the edge of the original image. This was done simply to fill out the proportion as the original was cropped to about 4/5 the the width.
Wallpaper: Saturn Eclipse
This image of Saturn is making the covers of many “Year in Science” issues out there right now. It may not have much science in it, but it sure is just about the most visually engaging image of the year. Hard to think that this IS NOT A FALSE COLOR image. Although it would be my guess its just a bit over-exposed… but then again so are most your holiday pictures.
Wallpaper: Mimas Against Ring Shadows
In one of Cassini’s more surreal images, the small moon Mimas is seen floating across the ring shadows cast upon Saturn’s cloud-tops. Mimas is a rocky 400km moon whose most notable feature is a 130km crater that dominates its appearance.
IMAGE NOTE: The original image was close to a square cropping, so a large part of the 1/3 left of the image (which is mostly black space) has been extended using data from the rest of the image to duplicate details and fill out the dimensions. The rest is the real deal.
Wallpapers: Saturn From Above and Behind
A new image recently returned from Cassini when passing into the dark side of the ringed giant. Seen from above the rings are being lit straight on with light reflecting off of them and captured by Cassini.
Here the rings of Saturn are lit from behind and take on quite a different appearance as the light is now filtered through the rings instead of reflected.
IMAGE NOTE: A considerable amount of the ring details have been fabricated in this image. Unfortunately, the original cropped about 1/3 of the right side of the image. The rings were completed by referencing pixels at the edge of the original and continuing the arc around. Where no information was available to fill the frame, other images of Saturn were referenced to guess at their appearance. Again… the left 2/3 of the image is untouched.