Psychedelic Saturn (warning: gigant-o-GIF)

I tried to do yet another smoothly-interpolated animation from raw frames of Cassini imaging data. It didn’t quite turn out how I expected, though it may work better if you crank some Hendrix while trying to watch it. (warning: HUGE GIF after the jump)

Cassini raw imaging data presents some interesting challenges if you’re going to try to do anything even remotely as smooth as the storm animation that got me started on this road. Photos are taken through different filters in rapid succession, highlighting some features, obscuring others. If photos shot through these wildly different filters are seen in rapid succession, the result is going to be a distracting constantly-changing contrast effect. I tried to smooth this out and use different photos from different filters anyway, just to try to get a sense of motion. But there just weren’t that many successes in this latest experiment: the contrast changes are too distracting, even if you’re focusing on small cloud features with laser-like intensity.

Here, then, is a very trippy voyage across Saturn’s northern hemisphere.