You like watching Saturn’s rings go all whooshy from the vantage point of a passing spacecraft? You’ve come to the right place. (Again, warning – great big animated GIF ahead.) … Read more
Turns out you can trawl through raw image data for Galileo, Voyager and other missions as well. So why not try to animate some Galileo collages of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? (warning: 7mb gigant-o-GIF after the jump) … Read more
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) … Read more
Well, not really, but this one’s kinda cool. If you’re wondering why I spend a lot of time on interpolating motion between frames, I present the following Cassini approach animation of Saturn’s big moon Titan. I did take the liberty of colorizing the frames so they’d approximate what you’d actually see. … Read more
Here’s a little mind-blower for you from Saturn’s E-ring. (big GIF after the jump) … Read more
Cassini did a close flyby of Titan the other day – Titan, of course, being the giant moon of Saturn that has a substantial atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane (natural gas to you and me). Want to see what Cassini saw through a specific filter as it sped away? Big animated gif beyond the jump. … Read more
My son is fascinated by this image over here, depicting Jupiter during Voyager 1’s approach in 1979. The other day, when that astounding, jaw-dropping picture of the huge, hurricane-like storm sitting atop Saturn’s north pole was released, showing a giant cyclonic vortex almost as wide as our entire continent, I showed it to him and he seemed strangely nonplussed. Then I had an idea: maybe it’s not as fascinating because it’s not moving. And that’s a hard thing to remedy, since Cassini is taking still pictures and not video, right? But hey, I’m an old video guy. I can brute-force this thing and “flipbook” it just like NASA and JPL did back in ’79.
I don’t often ask you guys to swallow a 13-meg animated GIF (see note below), but what you’re about to see after the jump is kind of nifty. It might just about be worth it. … Read more
Spaceflight is routine and completely safe.
Or so that was the thinking in 1985, when space shuttle Challenger took off for her eighth flight that July and experienced the most serious post-launch, pre-orbit emergency that any of the shuttle orbiters would encounter for… well… the next six months. … Read more
Launched on this date 50 years ago today: Mariner 2, the first man-made probe to successfully reach another planet (in this case, Venus, after a three-and-a-half-month cruise during which Mariner 2 kept trying to fall apart). … Read more
Let us know what you find on the other side, Neil.
“Go for descent” – click for full-sized version
Apologies to my readers who are expecting to, you know, actually find something to read here of late. I’ve been trying recently to recapture my sense of childhood wonder of learning about the universe around us through some artistic dabblings, and this was just the first thing that came to mind upon digesting the news of the death of Neil Armstrong. What sense of wonder was he feeling at this moment? … Read more
