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Posted by: jmknapp Nov 13 2005, 01:30 PM

The Planetary Society website http://www.planetary.org/saturn/cassini_tour.html has a page with diagrams of the whole Cassini tour, including this series which runs from July 2006 to June 2007 where Cassini goes significantly out of the ring plane:



That will give some great perspective views of the rings. I've been playing with rendering this part of the tour, with the help of the ring images at Bjorn's page http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/data/s_rings. Here's a part of one of those orbits:


http://cboh-t.cboh.org/~jmk/saturn.mpg

Still a bit of work to do to get the ring illumination/color right.

Posted by: Decepticon Nov 13 2005, 02:07 PM

I can't wait to see Saturn's north pole and ring animations.

Posted by: scalbers Nov 13 2005, 02:15 PM

The Celestia Freeware package also does a nice job with Saturn's rings and Cassini point of view animations.

Posted by: jmknapp Nov 13 2005, 03:54 PM

There's a problem there I think--the north pole is currently in shadow (northern hemisphere winter) so unless there's a really long extended mission, there will be no photos of the north pole?

Here's the Cassini view on Jan 22 2007: