Posted on 02/09/2005 11:30:14 AM PST by dead
THE first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue.
Instead, the image - released yesterday by the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado - shows that Saturn's northern hemisphere is a soft azure, striped by the shadows of the planet's rings.
In this image released by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005, a true color view from the Cassini spacecraft taken Jan. 18, 2005, shows the moon Mimas as it drifts along in its orbit against the azure backdrop of Saturn's northern latitudes. The long, dark lines on the atmosphere are shadows cast by the planet's rings. Saturn's northern hemisphere is presently relatively cloud-free, and rays of sunlight take a long path through the atmosphere. This results in sunlight being scattered at shorter (bluer) wavelengths, thus giving the northernmost latitudes their bluish appearance at visible wavelengths. (AP Photo/NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
The blue hue is a moody backdrop for Saturn's icy moon Mimas.
"It's pretty cool, and it also happens to be a neat picture," commented Chris Tinney, a Sydney-based astronomer with the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
According to Dr Tinney, a precise understanding of the blue view will come once the Cassini mission's imaging scientists analyse the picture in detail.
So far, the team -- located at the Boulder Institute's Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations -- suspects the colour is linked to the apparently cloud-free nature of the upper atmosphere of the northern latitudes.
The new blue view was snapped by the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on January 18, at a distance of roughly 1.4million kilometres from Saturn.
The images were taken using a combination of infrared, green and ultraviolet filters.
The imaging experts then adjusted the colours to match what the scene would look like in natural colour.
The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed and built at the jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of the US space agency NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.
Sh*t. That sucks. Now I have to redecorate the entire solar system.
Amazing picture.
You forgot the /sarcasm tag....
Wow.
visible light isn't exactly what should be used to study space objects.
it's quite inaccure, really, and bounces off the slightests things (dust clounds, etc)
these days, we can use anything from low-band radar to infrared (all much lower and less sensitive than visible light) to make an image.
most new space imaging technology pays little attention to visible light, hence why color correction is required (and is not always possible to do accuratly)
Sarcasm? What sarcasm?
I'm not talking about "doing science." I'm talking about marketing fotos for publicity! It's the marketing that enables the funding for "the science."
"If this were a private enterprise, we'd have been to the Jupiter and Saturn already, and the asteroid belt would be gone after we have mined them all out. ;)"
Nah, they'd have just outsourced the work to India, and we would be waiting on the phone.
I also was expecting to see a picture of the new Saturn...car!
Who's stopping you?
In a related announcement, Ward Churchill took note of the small round Nazi in the lower portion of the image.
For the record, I've never accepted the leftist media force-feeding us the line that "Blue = 'Rat" "Red = Republican." Red has ALWAYS been accepted as a leftist color and blue a conservative color. A "Red" area is and will always be a liberal 'Rat color, period.
I'll wait for the retraction regarding "true color."
Unless someone can explain what happens to re-color that reflected blue light on its way to my earthbound eyes, and to earthbound telescopes (and Hubble.)
Could it be that you're not seeing the northern hemisphere as much from your telescopes?
There is something wrong here.
This results in sunlight being scattered at shorter (bluer) wavelengths, thus giving the northernmost latitudes their bluish appearance at visible wavelengths.
Now I'm no space expert, but if you look at the other pics of Saturn, the planet goes from light to dark from the center outwards.
If this picture is of the northernmost part, couldn't it very well be bluish as lighten to orange as you look south?
Maybe it gets blue when you look away from the sun at that particular angle, an angle you don't see from here on earth.
Saturn is slightly yellowish to my eye. Maybe cutting down the intensity by viewing through neutral sunglasses brings out the blue.
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