<Cue irritating music jingle>
It’s 2116 and vacation time is approaching! You and the famunit (even the symbionts!) are probably thinking of vacationing somewhere cool. May we suggest Dione, an icy moon of Saturn?
Sure, you can probably hear your kids complaining: we’ve already skied the rim of Romulus and hiked the floor of Aurunca Chasmata a million times, can we please find someplace new?
What do you do?
Why, you grab this handy-dandy atlas of Dione, courtesy of the Cassini imaging team! If you keep this atlas on the desktop of your BrainStack® you’ll never lack for a fun and exciting place to plan your day (but be careful — a day on Dione takes almost 66 hours! Pack a lunch!).
Want to hike the central peak of Sabinus? Plumb the icy rifts of Eurotas Chasmata? Or have a contest to see who can spot Saturn’s edge-on rings from Mazentius?
All this is right at the tip of your synapses with the Cassini Atlas of Dione. Maps are only 6 credits each, or all in one file (prebundled for BrainStacks version 3.1.415 or later) for just CR50!
If you download this atlas from the central server in the next 3×1010 nanoseconds, we’ll even throw in audvid tour of Dione featuring an introduction by President Spears.
Act now! Dione awaits!
May 20th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
LOL! And I mean that sincerely!
~David D.G.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
You’re weird…
…not that there’s anything wrong with that…
JOhn.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
BA writes: “…we’ve already skied the rim of Romulus and hiked the floor of Aurunca Chasmata a million times, can we please find someplace new?
What do you do?”
Well on Earth the French Quarter in New Orleans still has some of the best music and unhealthy-but-delicious fried food in the solar system.
Cool pictures though!
May 20th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
The future sounds cool.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Mmmm, now I’ve got pi on the BrainStack.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I see BrainStack® appears to be an heir of Latex (I refuse to adhere to silly personal preferences about orthography. Take that, Bell Hooks).
May 20th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
AAARGHHH!!! you left the jingle turned on! make it stop!
May 20th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Has Hoagland already found some alien activity, or has NASA finally learnt how to doctor its pictures effectively?
May 20th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I’m not looking forward to 2116 when a simple public download will cost 50 Credits!
May 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I still can’t believe that that Spears was re-E-appointed by the Presidential Appointment Commission the over Obama the XIVth. What a rip off.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
We’ve been round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares malestrom and round perdition’s flames. When do we give up and go home?
May 20th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Dione sucks! Go Titan, and it’s team, the Titan City er… Titans! They may be only 14% as strong as an equivalent earth team, thus requiring a wheelchair for the super bowl, but they sure can throw the ball!
May 20th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Version 3.1.416, surely?
May 20th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Not since ‘Battlefield Earth’ have I be submitted to technobabble so contrived.
Thanks for that, Phil
.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Dione’s nice and all, sure. But with Xenon prices soon to top CR4 per liter, it’s gonna cost a working man two weeks’ compensation just getting there and back, more if he’s still driving on first-gen ion thrusters. Sheesh. Some things never change.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
President … Spears?!
/me throws self into the Eurotas Chasmata
May 20th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I don’t check the site often enough to reply within 30 seconds!
May 20th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Of course President Spears. After President Jenna Bush* was impeached the whole family values thing came back into vogue.
*Ironically Jenna Bush replaced Jenna Jameson who was rumoured to have corrupted an intern in the Oval Office.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
If you can spot the edge on rings from Mezentius, that you definitely deserve a cookie!!! Considering the fact that Mezentius is smack dab in the middle of the anti-Saturn hemisphere so you wouldn’t be able to see the rings from there.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Jason Perry, wow. I checked the latitude but not the longitude! If 0 degrees longitude is defined as the Saturn facing meridian, then you’re right. Mezentius is at almost exactly 180 degrees.
Oops.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
But then again, if your goal is to provide busy work for the kids, then that might be a good project
May 20th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
This is of course after Ron Popeil invented the technology to keep heads alive in jars, and now they’re running for president.
Well, at least it isn’t Nixon!
May 21st, 2008 at 2:42 am
But I elected President Scroob… oh… Spaceball City was somewhere else!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:41 am
It’s odd, when I first saw the map above I thought it was some kind of wind chart or other odd vector map of Earth. My pareodilia lobe sees North America in the upper left, a less-clear South America below it, the yawning Atlantic in the middle of the image, a sort-of Africa/Europe/Asia/Philippines blob east of that, with Australia MIA. The 2D stretching of the poles made me think of the Arctic and Antarctic.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:13 am
[...] VÃa Bad Astronomy Blog [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
BA can remember it for you wholesale.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:39 am
You’re forgetting the chance to witness the all day race… when superatheletes circumnavigate the moon doing ~8 minute km to keep the sun at the horizon.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
[...] moon Dione. The atlas is available as a set of 15 PDF files at a scale of 1:1,000,000. Via Bad Astronomy and Universe Today. This is the third atlas of a Saturnian moon that has been released by the [...]