North pole storms

[mmcirvin]

I'm perversely proud of the fact that I did my amateur image processing magic on all those pretty pictures from Cassini at Saturn and not once included the rings. Well, here's a picture that still does not include the rings. But it does include their shadows:




I think that all those little measles are storm clouds. I like the disorienting way that the planet's wavy cloud bands and the ring shadows are following completely different sets of curves. The northern hemisphere is said to be in "double winter" right now, because it's both tilted away from the sun and intermittently shadowed by the rings. I think that one purpose of these pictures is to see if that has any effect on the weather.

This picture actually contains about as much fakery as the big Dione color shot. I got the colors from a series of visible exposures (I suspect that the color balance is unrealistically blue, but if so, JPL's done worse themselves). But the brightness channel is actually from an infrared photo, to bring out all those storm specks; they'd be nearly invisible in a true-color image. And I put a little unsharp mask on it too.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Totally wicked, dude.