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.

Archive for the 'Saturn' Category

Ross Berens Ruins My Dreams

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

I had really always thought it would be so cool to do a poster set with great design for each of the planets. I actually started a design for the Cassini at Saturn mission, but have yet to complete it. Sure enough someone comes along and knocks the whole system out in one fantastic series. Beat me to it!

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Prometheus, Small Moon of Saturn

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Prometheus is the small moon that shepherds Saturn’s outer “F” ring and causes those crazy waves in the particles that make up the ring itself. The phenomenon has been the theme of at least 3 different animations here on wanderingspace.net. The image above is what that small moon in those animations looks like from 60,000 km taken by Cassini on Dec 26, 2009.

Back-Burner Image: Saturn Clouds

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010


Haven’t come across too much lately. When that happens, I like to post these images that have been sitting around collecting virtual dust. Cloud top formations on Saturn taken by Cassini in 2009.

Through the Plumes!

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Gordan of course.

The Fountains of Enceladus

Friday, November 27th, 2009

This has to be one of the greatest, most alien images ever taken from robotic spacecraft. It approaches how I might expect Enceladus to be depicted if it were in a Star Trek movie. As if the plumes at the edge of the disk back-lit by the Sun were not enough… the trail of smaller plumes breaking through the darkness is absolutely fantastic. The above is a real image but the color is an artistic interpretation by someone would know. Considering how little color is usually found at Enceladus, we can image this is really as good as if it were compiled from a full RGB set of filters. A larger monotone of the same image here.

This image was compiled by Astro0 on unmannedspaceflight.com. Also one of the best views staring down the length of one of Enceladus’ “tiger stripes”.

Ever so sharp look straight down on the South Pole of Enceladus from 1,855 km.

The Plumes of Enceladus in Color (kind of)

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Like the Saturnshine image posted earlier, this is only an estimation of a true color image. Five sources were used to compile this image; clear 1, clear 2, red, blue and another clear filtered image was used to replace the missing green to round it out (this work by S_Walker from unmannedspaceflight.com). We then additionally cleaned out artifacts from the original images and blurred the surrounding geyser haze largely to eliminate posterization noise.

This is the first time anyone has been able to attempt a true color view of the geysers with the availability of the red and blue images. Also a bonus is the considerable amount of Saturnshine seen on the dark side of the moon.

Enceladus at 9,988 km

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

More coming. Looks like a nice encounter.

Dueling Enceladian Light Sources

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Gordan U compiled this image of Enceladus lit both by Sun and Saturnshine. The side lit by reflected light from Saturn is in infrared and in the original appeared in a green hue. I took some liberties and imaged it as I would imagine it really would appear to the eye in Saturn’s more orange/yellow hues.

Worth noting tomorrow the images are due in from Cassini’s closest approach yet through its plumes. Hoping for some amazing material.

Enceladus: All In One View

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Seen in this image are Enceladian surface features and it’s geysers in action. This is normally not possible as the geysers are not normally visible unless they are back-lit… which they are in this image. The difference is that the surface details of Enceladus are being lit by an additional light source: Saturnshine. This makes for a fairly rare view where both details can be seen in one view.

50 Years of Space Exploration Map

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

This is so nice, but I am furious that I didn’t get to design this. This is Information design at it’s best naturally by National Geographic. You can see 50 years of robotic planetary exploration at a glance. It even includes failed missions represented by darker desaturated lines. As far as I can tell the cream colored lines are US and the red ones are Soviet. Interesting to see how many of those lines go dark around Mars.

Now where does one purchase such a thing? Perhaps this month’s issue of NG? Here is the link to it on their site complete with zoom viewer and them some kind samaritan posted a hires version to flickr.

A Saturnian Aurora Captured

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Astro0 (a contributor to unmannedspaceflight.com) had been looking through a 159 frame set of images that showed a tiny portion of Saturn’s sunlit limb. He animated it just to see the effect and happened upon a pretty nice animation of a Saturnian aurora (click here for the animation). Which is likely the first time we are seeing an aurora on another world so clearly animated.

To be clear… the spots that stand still in the animation are artifacts of the images. The streaks are stars seemingly flying by due to Cassini’s cameras being trained on one spot as it and Saturn itself are moving through space. Astro0’s blog can be found here and I suspect will soon feature a post with more details on the animation in the very near future.

Saturnati XXIII

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Image by Gordan Ugarkovic.

The Enterprise Emerges From Titan

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Nice example of science meets Hollywood.

Partial Eclipse of Titan

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

A nice back-logged image I never posted. Rhea passes in front of Saturn’s larger, hazy moon Titan (which is lit from behind by the sun). Taken June of 2006.

Saturn at Equinox

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

An official NASA image released of Saturn at equinox. You can only see Saturn like this approximately every 15 Earth years as it takes Saturn that long to reach a point in it’s orbit where the ring plane is directly aligned with the sun light. Turning the usually dramatic ring shadows that are cast along Saturn’s cloud tops into a thin black line running around it’s globe.

This composite took 75 separate images of Saturn to complete the full hires version seen here at planetary.org.