The storm at the top of the world

WARNING! GIGANT-O-GIF AFTER THE JUMP!

Remember the delightfully huge aniamted GIF of the polar vortex at Saturn a while back? Cassini recently completed another relatively close pass of Saturn’s north polar region, effectively initiating another staring contest with the huge hexagonal eye that sits there spinning at the top of the ringed planet. The results were simply too awesome not to animate.

Be warned that the GIF animation here runs about 22 megabytes and will take a minute or two to load and run through once, after which it will run at full speed. This is a cropped, reduced-size version; you can click on the link to see the full-size, 84 megabyte (!!) animation to best effect.

Saturn north polar vortex

22mb animated GIF. Please allow time to load and run through once to watch at full speed.

As with the previous animation I did, I had my animation program produce some transitional “tweening” frames to go between frames that would’ve otherwise seemed to be jumpy. Even then, some of the between-frame transitions aren’t that graceful. I concentrated on the output of three particular filter combinations: CB3+CL2, CL1+red, and CB2+CL2. Other filters and filter combos yielded very little detail in the vortex area.

The images were taken from a distance of under 400,000 miles from Saturn’s cloudtops on June 15 by Cassini. (What were you doing on June 15th? Chances are your answer is not “zipping past a giant planet 745,645,431 miles away”.)

In staring at this animation, I also felt there should be music, and one piece of music sprang instantly to mind (I’m a weird soundtrack fan like that). Feel free to start it below, and then go back to look and listen. (The music player widget is also on the huge version of this animation.)

[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/thatsit.mp3]
The Black Hole soundtrack is available from Intrada Records

So, NASA… about that video production position you keep on not hiring me for…?

Click here for the full sized 84 megabyte version of this. If you dare.

Images were retrieved from Cassini raw image server.