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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. … 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.