You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
« Wallpaper: Saturn and Mimas
Wallpaper: Martian Water Ice »

Wallpaper: Hyperion Encounter

Wallpaper: Hyperion Encounter
We have all seen plenty of craters in the Solar System but none appear the way they do on Hyperion. As of this time there are only loose theories about the nature and cause of Hyperion’s sponge-like appearance. Brighter outer layers give way to darkened crater bottoms and do this fairly consistently across the entire surface of Hyperion. It is also is second largest irregularly shaped body in the Solar System (#1 being Neptune’s Proteus) and is one of the only chaoticly rotating bodies ever discovered. The spin-axis is so insane that any future visitors to Hyperion will have to wait until they are real near-by to decide where they might be landing as it is actually near impossible to project how Hyperion will be oriented at any given future moment.

IMAGE NOTE: The color was overlaid from another image of Hyperion and the is largely artistic.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under 1440x900, Hyperion, Wallpaper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Wallpaper: Hyperion Encounter”

  1. Gary Nicholls Says:
    August 21st, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    My first thought when I first (recently) saw Hyperion was ‘How come it always got hit with stuff that seemed to be heading directly to the centre ? Where are chunks taken out by objects hitting at odd angles or off-centre?’ Somethings not right. My immediate reaction was that this was an object that gassed stuff OUT, that the odd ‘craters’ are the result of popped bubbles at the surface. Maybe an icy body that somehow got boiled by radiation? A strange skeleton left by the final efforts of a dying star ?

  2. thomas Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 12:10 am

    I think the going theory right now is that it is a very porous body that when struck by an object, almost absorbs the object rather than clashes. If you imagine how an object hitting sand reacts, it is similar. They think the darker material was already underneath the lighter material at the top which only exposes it in loosely packed materials upon impact. But who knows, if that is all the case then why is it so porous and why the lighter material at the top and darker just beneath? Some wonder if this darker material has anything to do with the dark material found at Iapetus.

Leave a Reply