This look at SATURN by CASSINI is top-down space porn.
Fucking Cassini! Good guy Cassini! Floating through space and taking staggeringly beautiful pictures of Saturn. This latest mosaic is fucking phenomenal.
Deets and the full image after the jump.
OK, you should know by now that words never fail me. Let me take you on a journey, one that’s 1.6 billion kilometers long…
On Oct. 10, 2013, Cassini took 36 shots of Saturn, a dozen each using red, green, and blue filters which approximate true color. Ugarkovic grabbed the raw files, processed them, and assembled them into this mosaic.
The detail is incredible. Cassini was high above Saturn to the north, looking “down” on the ringed world when it took these images. You can see the bizarre hexagonal north polar vortex, the six-sided jet stream flowing around Saturn. The subtle but beautiful bands mark the cloud tops of Saturn’s atmosphere. Unless I’m mistaken, the thin white line you see wrapping around the planet at mid-latitude is the remnant of a vast storm so huge it completely dwarfed our own home world of Earth. And if you look carefully (you can measure it!) you can see that Saturn is highly flattened, its equatorial diameter wider than through the poles.
