This is a great sequence of images. It's one of the most spectacular Cassini-related movies I have seen and even more so as I am interested in seeing what atmospheric refraction looks like at Saturn (highly useful as "ground truth" when doing 3D renders/simulations).

Great work!

BTW Alex Blackwell (who still reads the stuff here regularly) asked me to pass along his compliments - he agrees that this is very cool.

Nice to hear that Alex is out there still, Bjorn; thanks! (Hi Alex! )

Did anyone already mention the RPWS results?
Creepy! Gloomy! Cosmic! I don't know what else...
But you can put a soundtrack to the ring plane crossing...

I've animated the 11 color frames Cassini took during ring plane crossing of Feb 4, 2007. There's also the lower mosaic footprint for each frame available, but this is where the "action" is. The 2 RGB frames taken immediately after RPX were taken in 8 bit mode and heavily compressed so they were somewhat of a salvage job and slight color shifting is noticeable.

Click on the thumbnail for the animated GIF (cca 4 MB):


I'll also take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year!

Happy 2008 to you as well, Gordan, and thank you for this wonderful New Year's gift to us all! Terrific job, as is your usual.

Here's another crossing sequence, this time from the VIMS spectrometer in approximately natural color. It runs for almost 12 hours (starting at about 2007-01-17 15:05 UTC), but the actual crossing is missing, sadly:



Magnified 3x using nearest neighbor algorithm. I think a faint spoke can be seen in the B ring at the beginning of the sequence, running clockwise. This is the same sequence I assembled into a GIF at the start of this thread using wide-angle imagery.

Gordan's animation of the 4 Feb 07 ring plane crossing is featured in Emily's latest TPS blog entry. Congratulations, sir!

Another short animation, this time of the opposition surge on the rings. It's 15 frames showing the surge starting from outside the A ring and off Saturn's disc, crossing the outer part of the rings almost parallel to them and entering the B ring. Mimas also makes a brief appearance.

Here's the last frame from the low-res version:
Click to view attachment

Half resolution animated gif (1.5 megabyte)
Full resolution animated gif (6.4 megabytes)

Too bad there's no good file format for this kind of a large slideshow that wouldn't sacrifice quality too much.

The sequence actually has 16 frames, but one RGB set got bad data dropouts due to a DSN gap so I omitted it. Raw data got saturated in the blue channel and also a bit in the red channel at certain points. It's quite a white-colored opposition effect, not proportional to the rings' brownish color.

Here's another zero phase observation, this time from VIMS:

Click for 24-image sequence.

An accompanying wide-angle RGB ride-along was also taken, officialy released is this snapshot from the sequence.

Here's a 345 frame ring sequence quicktime movie taken by the wide angle camera. Snapshot here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...0/N00108160.jpg

It shows spokes in the B ring rotating. As usual, compression destroys the subtleties, but the spokes are apparent in the quicktime movie, especially at the beginning. I think I might have rotated it 180 degrees the wrong way in the process (so north could be down).

Link to download here (caution: 6.6 megabytes).

Oy...way cool, Gordan! Thank you very, very much!

That is just amazing. I never expected to see a spokes movie.

Why? They were originally observed in Voyager movies.

http://pds-rings.seti.org/saturn/animations/saturn_spoke.mov

Of course!! I do remember seeing it on television - a long time ago. Strangely, though, I can't seem to open that movie now.

This is somewhat redundant, but I've redone the October 18/19 ring movie with PDS data. 260 frames (a couple with data dropouts, those were missing in the jpeg raws) running from Oct 18, 2007 21:11 to Oct 19, 2007 08:20, one frame every 155 seconds. I've reduced the framerate in this one to 8 fps because more detail is visible so to lower the pace a bit.

The moons entering into the view are Pandora, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus in a bunch, then Janus and Pan and finally Epimetheus at the end.
Daphnis is a little tough to catch, here's a blowup of a single frame:
Click to view attachment

Link here (13 MB Quicktime)

Absolutely marvelous, Gordan, thanks for posting this!!! My wife & I just watched it several times, and it totally blew our minds.

Ugordan, this is the most amazing choreography I ever saw! Bravo!!!

Very nicely done! Thanks.

Daphnis looks like it is enlarging the Keeler Gap in its wake.