Oh Saturn, you are such a showboat. This is the second glorious image Cassini has snapped of the solar system’s celebrity planet backlit by the distant sun. Which do you like best? More below .. [Read more…]
Look at Jupiter and you see a mini solar system right down to quasi-analogues of the planets, even a hint of scattered disk and Kuiper Belt objects. But look at Saturn and you see one large Jovian like moon, a hell of a lot of beat to shit frozen moonlets, and billions of icy shards. The systems surrounding these two planets clearly diverged, violently by the look of it. Now some planetary scientists think they have an idea how it went down out Saturn’s way: [Read more…]
Iapetus, ice moon of beautiful Saturn, the two-faced moon. It is gleaming white, bumpy and tradionally cratered in some places, ridged across most of the equator with a Death Star like giant circle on one side, and bruised black and blue, literally misshapen, across an entire hemisphere from what was no doubt an ancient wound of titanic proportions. Iapetus may also have the weirdest avalanches or debris slides, or whatever the term is, in the solar system: [Read more…]
A mosaic of Cassini images of Saturn and rings. The halo effect is due to the sun in eclipse behind the 6th planet. Click for more info on the rings. Image credit NASA/JPL
It’s not often we get a fortuitous example of how the UFO-conspiracy crowd manufactures their BS. … OK, maybe it happens all the time! But an absolutely must see time elapsed video put together by the Cassini-Equinox team provides just such an opportunity. Below is that same video together with some background, culminating in the UFO nonsense. [Read more…]