Rev 139 - Oct 4-28, 2010, Titan, Mimas, Pallene, Dione and Rhea Options

[ugordan]

Why is it that I actually prefer that one?

Because from what I gather from you, your monitor brightness is set so high that that one actually might look like it's supposed to!

[titanicrivers]

Location of clouds over the anti-Saturn hemisphere. N00164561 CL1 CB3 image enhanced via unsharp mask and compared to the Solar System Simulator view of Titan from Cassini at 2.46M km on October 18th. Celestia grid shows many of the clouds are in the southern hemisphere especially along the southern equatorial zone. Amazing images!

[ugordan]

Woohoo! The rest of the Scientist for a Day observation is down on the ground. This is going to make a great movie.
Also, another mutual event with Dione and then both disappearing behind Saturn's night side. What I wouldn't give for the 3-filter sets to be taken instantaneously for this one...

[ugordan]

Some eastward motion of the clouds is noticeable in this two-frame flicker gif combining the previous CB3/BL1 and (3xCB3)/MT1 taken several hours later.



I don't think it's a parallax effect as the subspacecraft point appeared to not move much judging by lack of terrain feature rotation (don't use the limb as a reference because it's not the real limb but an arbitrary cutoff where low source S/N after division caused ugly artifacts).

[titanicrivers]

Neat animation Gordon
And here's a scene that can only be seen through Cassini's camera eyes! The image on the bottom is a 3D ... yep another eye-crosser.

[scalbers]

Some eastward motion of the clouds is noticeable in this two-frame flicker gif combining the previous CB3/BL1 and (3xCB3)/MT1 taken several hours later.

What a nice animation! Speaking of familiarity (as per Emily earlier) reminds me a bit of the Intertropical Convergence Zone on Earth.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...enceZone-EO.jpg

As per this modeling story (and paper), the ITCZ on Titan would be just temporarily over the equator, moving seasonally in latitude much more than on Earth. Does this match the chronology of the cloud latitudes we've seen so far?

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/070920/titan.shtml

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/49/18421.full

The continuity over long distances of the clouds and their motion doesn't seem to look quite as convective compared with the terrestrial example though, at least from this distant view.

So what's the weather over Huygens right now. Will it be set afloat?

[titanicrivers]

Here's another look at the eastward cloud motion on Titan on Oct 18. The animation compares N00164561 taken at 14:40 from 2.467M km with one (N00164618) taken 1 hr and 45 min later from 2.497M km. Change in image size has been compensated for and surface features (Bazaruto facula and Elba facula) used a fixation points. Parallax error due to Titan orbital and spacecraft motion should be small and not account for the cloud shift I would think.