Oooo, The Big Picture has taken on Enceladus. Awesome.
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Enceladus is a small moon of Saturn, and Cassini has been sending back totally incredible images of it. The one above I hadn’t seen before, and it’s spectacular! Those little nodules of ice are actually a couple of hundred meters across. Go look at the rest of them. Seriously, wow.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
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DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
October 24th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Wow! I kept finding new favorites as I scanned down the page. Beautiful!
October 24th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
The Big Picture really puts things in perspective. Absolutely marvelous!!!
October 24th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Those pics are absolutly incredible! Everyone should take a look, you won’t regret it!
October 24th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Whoa.
October 24th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
snowball fight!!!!
October 24th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
COOL!
October 24th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Stunning photos. Thanks for sharing.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
That surface looks awfully dark for a moon that’s supposed to have a near-100% albedo.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
WOW. I love the flyby animation, and as for the first picture…I want a huge poster of that on my wall.
The moon looks so pristine and delicate, and as for the enormous out of focus surface of Saturn in the background…Beyond words.
The comments on The Big picture about tax dollars made me smile too.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Compared to what? When you’ve got nothing to compare a surface to, it’s hard to say if it’s bright or not, given the vagaries of exposure time and computer editing. Consider the Moon: it looks amazingly bright in the night sky, but it reflects about only 10% of the light that hits it. It’s all a matter of context.
As for the Boston Globe, I wonder why they turned so many of the pictures upside-down? (And why their image credits are inconsistent, he says, standing up for his co-workers’ hard work.)
October 24th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
@ John Weiss:
“As for the Boston Globe, I wonder why they turned so many of the pictures upside-down?”
Oh dear, you must have logged on to the Australian version by mistake….
October 24th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[...] new, but well done. Courtesy of BA Blog: The Big Picture: Enceladus Boston.com does Enceladus up close __________________ 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Breathtaking!
BTW, whenever you mention Enceladus, I get a craving for Mexican food… Enchiladas, anyone?
October 24th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Ummm, please don’t mention Uranus…
October 24th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Prettyyyy o.o
October 24th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Hoooo! Worlds within whorls at spittin’ distance! This is what robotic sensing is all about!
In a world where the horizon is within a good Aerobee throw, can you see over the edge? (In the voice of the voice over guy who starts by saying, “In a world where . . .”)
And the resolution and discrimination will only get better. Wicked cool. Anx.
October 24th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Looks like a big snowball….floatin out there all alone….MMMMmmmmm…ice cream.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
“Look at it out there orbiting like it’s so cool…”
Sorry, random ATHF moment.
These pictures are amazing, simply amazing.
October 25th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Wow… seriously wow… as others have said…
and, is here an up or down in space?
October 25th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Oh, the other thing I wanted to say is that these images engender the same kind of reaction and feeling I had when seeing the first Voyager images of Enceladus lo these many years ago at JPL… what a wonderful thing to see!
October 25th, 2008 at 8:12 am
A commentary by Bob Park on this flyby with his usual snark about manned space flight.
4. MEANWHILE: CASSINI THUMBS ITS NOSE AT ASTRONAUTS.
Launched eleven years and two days ago on a mission to explore the planets and rings of Saturn, this amazing spacecraft dipped to within 25 kilometers of the surface to the moon Encelades, less than the distance of a marathon, and analysed the spray from the geyser-like plume of ice and water vapor near the south pole.
October 25th, 2008 at 8:26 am
One day with a bit of luck one day someone is going to look out of a window and say, “You know I’ve seen all the pictures but until you’ve seen it with your own eyes… Wow. Just. Wow”. Mandarin or Hindi translation not withstanding.
Having said that these pictures are just… gosh darnit they’re good.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Nah, studiowork. Hoax, I say, hoax
October 25th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Or a fine example of Poe: The real thing is so good it looks like a fake
October 25th, 2008 at 9:48 am
So breathtaking… Saturn and it’s moons are so incredibly photogenic. It’s amazing to me how the Cassini engineers could compute a trajectory that would take Cassini so close to each of Saturn’s moons — with a finite supply of propellant on board, and a many year life of the probe. I would love to see a book or write-up about how the initial Cassini orbit was chosen, how far apart each of the moons are, whether or not they are on the same plane, etc — written so in lay-person terms.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
“I’m still waiting for the day when I can surf the rings of Saturn,,,”
(Comment by the Silver Surfer,,,)
Gary 7
October 25th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Does anyone else see the phone box to the left of the black triangle at the top?
Doctor Who maybe?
Calling Richard Hoagland?
Where are you when we need you?
October 25th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I think, Fruit Fly, that what we are seeing is an automatic multidimensional transit station. They work quite simply. If you go in, you immediately come out elsewhere. Why they won’t post legible maps is quite beyond me. Last time I entered one here on Earth I had to find seventeen more to get home. Missed supper, too. And caught a nasty chill. And there is a suspicious lump just below my left collar bone that tingles sometimes. I shoulda just stayed home.
October 25th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I think I can see Bruce Willis!
October 25th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I love the moving image…32,211 mph…no traffic jams. Good stuff.
October 25th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Cassini KICKS MAJOR ASS!!!1!!!!!11one1!!!!!!eleven1!!
OK, NASA screws up sometimes, and that’s what seems to get all the publicity. The good stuff like this, the stuff that makes it worth all the aggravation, usually gets buried back in section D of the newspaper or right before signoff on the Friday late evening news.
Props to boston.com – and to the head-guy-what’s-in-charge of The Big Picture, who has a set of over 200 Cassini photos on filckr.
October 25th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Oops, of course I meant “flickr.” we can has preview button? pls? kthxbai.
October 26th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Sadly, in the comments on the site, there are several “we cant fix any of our problems on Earth and we waste money on useless space exploration”.
Some good people tried to defend cause by saying how small part of Federal budget NASA was and so on…
Response by somene:
QUOTE:
Nasa:
1. Provides jobs for nerds that would instead be addicted to WOW.
2. Gives us pictures. Thats right: PICTURES! I have yet to benefit from a picture, I’d rather have lower taxes, even if its $1.00 less (that’s a coke!)
3. It’s a relic of the cold-war space race. What do we need to prove anymore?
4. It’s funded on the hope that we’ll be living a Star Trek life one day! Sorry, but the laws of physics will keep you from ever leaving our little green planet.
5. Maybe we could colonize mars? Nope, NASA won’t even colonize the moon! They’d rather let dude’s muscles waste away in the ISS.
6. But we have velcro! What did we ever do without VELCRO?
Sure… we waste a lot of taxpayer money on a lot of stuff: wars, election campaigns, and supporting large numbers of “Welfare” drug habits. But that doesn’t mean we should be looking to waste more money on a defunct space program.
/END QUOTE
I have no ideas what to say to such a person.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
@ Aleksandar
Try telling them that if it wasn’t for mankind’s burning curiosity about what’s over the horizon, he would have never stepped down from the tree to walk upright towards that horizon; space is the final frontier.
Furthermore, if we don’t, another country will, as China and India have shown recently.
If that doesn’t convince them, then tell them to go and visit a taxidermist on their own behalf!
October 27th, 2008 at 4:25 am
MadHussein LOLscientist FCD said:
Don’t forget, of course, that Cassini is a joint venture of NASA, ESA and API. It must be that Italian engineering know-how that makes all the difference
October 27th, 2008 at 6:06 am
Aleksanar said:
I’ll have a go at providing some constructive responses here…
1) A) By providing jobs for “nerds” (or, more correctly, engineers and scientists), the Apollo programme gave the USA some of the best engineers in the world. When they left NASA, many of them contributed that education to other projects.
1) B) Also employ many more manufacturing folks than engineers or scientists – after all, who builds all the stuff that the engineers design?
2) A) If you feel you do not benefit from pictures, you are looking at the question in the wrong light. The “pictures” (actually, renderings from scientific data collected by something far more sophisticated than a mere camera) provide information that has never before been known. Not only does this fuel scientific discovery about the universe of which we are a part, it also fulfils other aspects of being human – such as the curiosity to explore and to discover, and the wonder and satisfaction of understanding what we observe.
2) B) Beautiful images of our solar system and the universe at large benefit hundreds of millions of people. Or do you begrudge anyone the pleasure of viewing something beautiful? (Potentially add in references to the Louvre or the Uffizi Gallery that house some of the world’s finest works of art.)
3) Has not been true for over 20 years. NASA is about exploration and discovery. Apollo was funded out of flag-waving fervour, but NASA nevertheless managed to get good science out of it.
4) Please cite where this information comes from – because it sounds like someone making stuff up on the spot.
5) NASA has never been given funding to colonise the moon. Likewise Mars. And, you know what? The new NASA director recently pointed out what role the ISS will need to play in understanding the gruelling journey to Mars. While the ISS (NB not exclusively funded by NASA) has not fulfilled its potential, it has a vital role to play in preparing for any deep-space manned mission.
6) We had velcro before NASA. What you fail to notice is that we have dozens of satellites surrounding the Earth doing science all the time so we can better understand our planet. So we have better weather forecasts; we have continuous information about climate change; we have continuous information about the stratospheric ozone layer; we have infomartion about deforestation in Indonesia or Amazonia that can inform studies of biodiversity and habitat loss. We also have satellites around the sun, observing, collecting data, enabling us to learn more about it, and hence, inter alia, we can get advance warning coronal mass ejections that might head in our direction and black out power grids and destroy communications and TV satellites. Everyone on the planet benefits directly from this information in one way or another.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Aleksandar quoted somebody as saying:
[quote]Nasa:
1. Provides jobs for nerds that would instead be addicted to WOW.[/quote]
I would respond to this, except my level 70 fury warrior needs to finish his Hallow’s End Achievements before zombies overrun Orgrimmar again.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:09 am
Sorry if this is a double post.
According to the U.S. Constitution, one of the Vice-President’s duties is to serve as Chairman of the Board of NASA.
Can you imagine Sarah Palin as Chairman of the Board of NASA? : O
She’d better start brushing up on her rocket science. : )