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mmcirvinNope, still no idea what the Sam Hill we're looking at here:
Again, north is to the right, and the bright spot at left is the south polar cloud. The dark region is one that didn't get a cute name from the ESO astronomers, but it's been called "the Sickle" by people analyzing Hubble and heavily processed Voyager pictures, because it hooks around to the northwest out of frame, like a sickle blade. It's known now that these dark areas are not the liquid hydrocarbon seas some imagined; they seem to be mostly water ice (dark in this infrared band). The rest of the picture, colored lighter by organic chemicals of some sort, is pretty mysterious-looking, though it reminds me more of Triton the more I look at it. The whole thing is still an excellent projective test for amateur planetary scientists.
I made this picture by taking one of the raw Cassini images taken through the surface-detail-revealing filter, subtracting out one of the featureless-looking ones to even out the effect of illumination angle, then jacking up the contrast.
Again, north is to the right, and the bright spot at left is the south polar cloud. The dark region is one that didn't get a cute name from the ESO astronomers, but it's been called "the Sickle" by people analyzing Hubble and heavily processed Voyager pictures, because it hooks around to the northwest out of frame, like a sickle blade. It's known now that these dark areas are not the liquid hydrocarbon seas some imagined; they seem to be mostly water ice (dark in this infrared band). The rest of the picture, colored lighter by organic chemicals of some sort, is pretty mysterious-looking, though it reminds me more of Triton the more I look at it. The whole thing is still an excellent projective test for amateur planetary scientists.
I made this picture by taking one of the raw Cassini images taken through the surface-detail-revealing filter, subtracting out one of the featureless-looking ones to even out the effect of illumination angle, then jacking up the contrast.