Posted on 08/30/2015 7:13:16 AM PDT by lbryce
The Rose
The Rose The spinning vortex of Saturn's north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Measurements have sized the eye at a staggering 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) across with cloud speeds as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second).
This image is among the first sunlit views of Saturn's north pole captured by Cassini's imaging cameras. When the spacecraft arrived in the Saturnian system in 2004, it was northern winter and the north pole was in darkness. Saturn's north pole was last imaged under sunlight by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1981; however, the observation geometry did not allow for detailed views of the poles. Consequently, it is not known how long this newly discovered north-polar hurricane has been active.
The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012, using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red. In this scheme, red indicates low clouds and green indicates high ones.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 261,000 miles (419,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 94 degrees. Image scale is 1 mile (2 kilometers) per pixel. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasa.gov ...
To say this is the greatest image ever taken is giving in to hyperbole but no doubt it expands the capacity of our imagination to ponder the sad,forlorn reality of the overwhelmingly mind-boggling things we'll never get to see.
It is available in several resolutions,the one here is the largest.
We’ll get a look at some new cool stuff next summer when the Juno spacecraft arrives at Jupiter.
You can also see the same basic geometry in hurricanes on Earth.
http://www.enterprisemission.com/hurricane3.htm
Global Warming!
We may never get to actually see these mind boggling beautiful things, but I’m glad for pictures and my mind’s eye.
Thank you so much for posting.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
Painting the roses red
We're painting the roses red
Oh, pardon me but Mr. 3,
Why must you paint them red?
This “false color” image is indeed pretty, but it reflects artistry as much as science. Where climatologists lie for money, the marketers of satellite missions gussy up their photographs with false colors to make them more appealing to the masses.
Admittedly, people can’t see near-infrared, so the photo artists have to assign SOME particular color to it. But the article says that Saturn was sunlit at the time, so let’s see a more realistic, visible light photograph as well.
Because we’re NASA and we’re part of the GUBMINT and if you don’t listen to how we want you to perceive the universe, well, we just might not let you see any more pictures. We’ll just pick em up take him home and you can’t play with them anymore So we better not see any green hexagons
Nice photo from the Saturn orbit.
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