I know, I borrowed my own title from last week.
But holy haleakale. This is magnificent.
I shrank the image to fit my blog, but stop whatever you are doing and go grab the bigger version! It’s incredible.
This one is spectacular as well:
It’s a mosaic of 165 separate images from Cassini, showing Saturn and its rings lit from behind by the Sun. It shows the fainter rings that are more difficult to spot from the other side. Different viewing angles give insight into the particles making up the rings, since they reflect and scatter light differently. Using different wavelengths — ultraviolet, visible, infrared — also helps astronomers understand what the particles are made of, and how big they are.
Sometimes, though, I don’t worry too much about the science. It’s also important to see that the images we get are simply stunning, gorgeous almost beyond comprehension. There is such beauty in nature! And for thousands of years of history, we had no idea what was out there, waiting for us to find it and drink it in.
I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: what else is out there, what things are there to know, what things are there to experience, that we have not yet discovered?
October 11th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
That is amazing. It looks more like a CGI special effect than an astronomy photo.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Has the BA written about why Saturn’s rings are so flat? I’d like to be reminded- because it seems so counterintuitive.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
looks great
October 11th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Thanks Phil, I just found my new desktop!
October 11th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
So unreal! And yet, there it is!
Rich, you inspired me. I’m doing that too!
BTW, just saw this image at NASA’s website for Cassini. Fast work, Phil!
October 11th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen since the first crescent Saturn image from Voyager back in the early 80′s.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
[...] Thanks to Bad Astronomy Blog » Best. Saturn. Picture. EVAH!. [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
BA said: “I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: what else is out there, what things are there to know, what things are there to experience, that we have not yet discovered?”
I so heartily agree! And I also say the same thing to many people I know, ususally follwed with something along the lines of “I wish I could live for a few hundred years, just to see what comes next!”
Saturn and its system of rings & moons is turning out to be even more incredible than I already thought it was. Wow! What indeed is next?
October 11th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
I’m not a scientist. I don’t even play one on TV. So when I see a picture like this, I don’t worry too much about the science, either. These pictures remind me, though, of NASA’s anouncement, some time back, that they wouldn’t fund any more shuttle trips to mend Hubble, right after it’s deep field shot was published. That shot is still my desktop, and I still scroll through it wondering at all the wonders of the universe in it. I think we need to keep visuals like this in the public eye – not hidden in obscure sites like Bad Astronomy (sorry Mr. BA) – to make our legislators understand how their constiuants feel about these programs. You listening, Yahoo? Maybe we should all write letters. If our idiot president isn’t going to support science, somebody has to. (Exit soapbox)
October 12th, 2006 at 1:23 am
I wanna fly in a spaceship and look at Saturn for the rest of my life :’)
That reminds me of a BBC documentary which is called “SPACE ODYSSEY: Voyage To The Planets”
It’s focus is on mankind exploring our solar system first hand with a futuristic spaceship. The ship even does a gravity “fling” around the sun, and brakes speed using Jupiters’ outer atmosphere. It’s awesome! Totally cool pictures and scientific explanations of those events.
I don’t know where you could get it (I don’t know if it’s available somewhere on the net)
Check here for more info:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/10_october/13/space.shtml
October 12th, 2006 at 3:28 am
B*gger
LINK
Link fixed by The BA
October 12th, 2006 at 3:44 am
BA, this goes so much beyond just Cool Stuff that you need a new category.. “Frigging Awesome”.
October 12th, 2006 at 3:52 am
[...] “Best. Saturn. Picture. EVAH!“, no Bad Astronomy; [...]
October 12th, 2006 at 4:17 am
“I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: what else is out there, what things are there to know, what things are there to experience, that we have not yet discovered?â€
I am both inspired by that, and slightly depressed, since we seem to spend SO MUCH money on things other than space exploration.
Please, oh please, let there be a way for us to explore extra-solar planets up close before I die. Probably not gonna happen, but I’ve got my fingers crossed, much in the same way as I would for a lottery ticket.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Great picture BA. I’m going to download it for my desktop. Oh, and have you heard about Jupiters little red spot turning red and speeding up. I just recently read about it on Yahoo, of all places.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:48 am
That reminds me, whatever became of spot “BA”?
October 12th, 2006 at 5:30 am
My first thought when I saw that pic was “new desktop.” It’s nice to see that at least a couple of you also thought that.
Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to post my own pictures of a planet or two- if I can just get my camera to focus in the ‘scope!!!!
October 12th, 2006 at 6:26 am
Are Saturn’s rings permanent or transient on geological time scales?
October 12th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Lab Lemming: The rings are transient on the order of hundreds of millions of years.
http://www.nineplanets.org/saturn.html
Christian: The rings are flat for much the same reason the solar system is (mostly) flat. Collisions (not literal impacts, but close gravitational interactions) between ring particles tend to dissipate any motion out of the plane. Basically if you add up all of the angular momentum of all of the particles in the rings, there will be a net or average angular momentum vector. Over time, everything will trend towards this average. Sphere->disc transitions are common in the cosmos: solar system formation, galactic formation, etc.
October 12th, 2006 at 8:28 am
Now it’s on the desktop — next, my phone
October 12th, 2006 at 8:33 am
Get these images in front of kids to encourage them to get into science. Beautiful and useful in so many ways.
October 12th, 2006 at 9:03 am
Also, if you can tear your eyes from the image and read the description – WE are in the photo also! Earth is the little dot on the left side of the rings.
This has been another good week in space exploration. First the MRO shots of Victora crater, the inside of the crater from Opportunity, and now this!
DANG! Awesome, awesome….
Tom
October 12th, 2006 at 9:17 am
I have a draft entry for Oval BA. I will probably put it up tonight.
October 12th, 2006 at 10:37 am
By the way, this is also pretty cool… or should I say hot?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061012.html
October 12th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Thanks, BA, for drawing our attention to another fantastic image. And a big “woohoo!” to the Cassini team for their Saturn orbiter. Again.
October 12th, 2006 at 10:56 am
thanks for the cool picture… now there’s another site i have to add to my daily blogging.
October 12th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Yeech! Why aren’t the pictures displaying for me?! I’ll have to wait until I get to work to see this one as well.
October 12th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Yep, it’s already on the desktop, replacing my Star Trek “motivator” (“EXPENDABILITY: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Ricky are beaming down to the planet. Guess who’s not coming back”). I had to resize it to make sure that I could see the Earth. Although it does seem to obstruct my view of Venus.
October 12th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
A truly amazing image. The folks on the Cassini imaging team must have had a great time putting this one together. If you look carefully at the large image you can see that the stars are all doubled due to the multiple exposures taken as the spacecraft was moving. At first I thought those were actual double stars, but I noticed that they were all oriented in the same direction.
I also want to make one small correction to Jon Niehof’s otherwise fine explanation of the flattening of the rings: it really is collisions that damp down the motions, not just gravitational interactions. Those ring particles really are hitting each other. The timescale of collisions for a particle that isn’t in the ringplane is on the order of the optical depth (how easily can you see through it) times the orbital period.
If it was really just gravitational, then you would get a kind of equipartition with the larger particles forming a really thin layer while the smaller ones get scattered farther out of the plane.
October 12th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Wow, you’re right. That’s cool.
October 12th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
That tops the Best Mars Picture Evah in my book. Simply stunning.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
[...] Space (I Believe In) If you believe in space, go visit the Bad Astronomy Blog for some truly stunning recent pictures of Saturn and Mars. I’ve been going over there just to look at Saturn all day and Mars for the past week. There’s nothing more important than stopping occasionally to gape and wonder at the profound beauty of the universe. [...]
October 12th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Wow a Saturnian eclipse. It is so heavily processed I’d go for one of the natural images anyday. The Mars rover image tops it big time. The icing on that cake was how the angle of the sun magnified the shadow of the scan platform.
October 12th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Request to Pro Libertate: Celestial mechanics being what it is, please wait for the Earth’s occultation of Venus to end and put away your Illudium P.U.-36 Space Modulator. Thank you.
October 12th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Thanks Jon for the explanation regarding the flat rings. That does make sense. I can see that this is probably the only structure which would remain stable over time because the orbiting rocks don’t run into each-other’s paths.
Why isn’t it possible though for two rings at different radii to orbit in different planes (at an angle to each-other)?
October 12th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
The main reason you can’t have two rings at different angles has to do with Saturn itself.
Saturn isn’t a perfect sphere. It’s spin makes it bulge at the equator. In fact, it bulges enough that you can even see it in the pictures above: Saturn has a bad case of middle-age spread.
But this has a neat affect on the orbits of anything going around Saturn. A circular orbit along the equator doesn’t change much over time. But if you give that orbit a little tilt, it starts doing things that Kepler never imagined: it precesses. In other words, the plane of the orbit twists slowly over time.
The reason this is a problem is that the rate of twisting changes depending on how far you are from the center of the planet. So imagine a ring tilted in comparison to the equator. A little while later, the inner part of the ring has twisted 80 degrees in comparison to where it started, while the outer part has only twisted 60 degress. The whole thing is shearing apart, and soon different parts of the ring are crashing into each other.
Now we’re back to the problem that Jon described, with all of the pieces colliding until it’s all down in one plane: the plane of the equator.
So that’s why Saturn (and all of the other giant planets) have rings that are directly over their equators.
Isn’t planetary dynamics fun?
October 12th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Where the hell did you get that stupid picture BUB!
October 12th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Well! I didn’t mean it ‘coz I have better pictures of saturn than tis one. Anyway, I liked your blog site very much. I LOVE IT!
October 13th, 2006 at 6:31 am
ABR,
You mean this is a temporary phenomenon? Oh, okay. No need for an Earth-shattering kaboom, then.
October 13th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
I *did* stop what I was doing. I proceeded to run (not walk) to my big photo inkjet printer and blast out a 13″x19″ print of the shot. Gwarjiss!
I also put the image in front of high school students via a DLP in a darkened classroom. They might not have been as jazzed about the shot as I was, but that’s more a matter of me being completely awestruck and transfixed.
Thanks BA!
October 13th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I love it that many of us put the pictures BA posts on our desktops. People who come to my desk to visit ask about the pictures, and with BA’s help, I answer. I love it! Spreading the word about astronomy! I also post these pictures as my myspace backgrounds. Keep posting hot naked pictures of the universe, BA!
October 13th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Regarding Dean Baird’s comment: Maybe the majority of students won’t be inspired by an amazing Saturn image, but I still recall how awestruck I was in 6th grade by an image of Jupiter my math teacher placed in the class room by the then recent Voyager 1 mission.
October 14th, 2006 at 10:26 am
This is a bit off topic. But I think you’re the crowd that will direct me to the best answer. Is there a night sky star chart adapted to a 6,000 year old earth? A star chart that would only show stars that are 6,000 light years from earth? A star chart that has all stars further away deleted? I’m doing a comparison of reality and creationist ah ? Whatever they call that nonsense they believe in. Anyone? Your input is appreciated. Thanks JamesR
October 15th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Troy, you reminded me of my time as a student. Our student union Astronomical Society had ordered a set of slides from Voyager 2′s flyby of Neptune in 1989. The first time we viewed them was fantastic. We had never before seen such amazing pictures.
October 16th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Dear BA, a freind of mine sent me to your blog spot and I found your pictures so beautiful I had to comment.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:37 am
This picture is so beautiful! I thought it was fake at first but i will definatley be usuing it for a school project of mine!