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I'f I'm reading this picture right, it looks like it shows Epimetheus raising a displacement wave in the ring system, seen almost edge-on.
Feb. 26th, 2005
Big Saturn
Feb. 26th, 2005 02:26 pmBy the way, if you want a desktop picture of Saturn, this will probably do the job no matter how big your monitor is.
Another note on color expectations: For a long time I thought JPL was exaggerating the blueness in pictures of the ring-shadowed region near the terminator in the northern hemisphere of Saturn; it didn't match old Voyager pictures. I even toned down the blueness in my own color composites.
But the current story is that the pictures really are that blue. It's probably a combination of several things. The blue color here comes from Rayleigh scattering of light by gas, just as it does on Earth. The dominant golden color, on the other hand, comes from the yellow tint of Saturn's clouds. Near the edge of Saturn's disc, we're looking through the atmosphere at a glancing angle and Rayleigh scattering becomes more important; near the terminator, the incoming light is doing the same, with a similar effect.
Finally, the Voyagers encountered Saturn nearer the Saturnian equinox; there may be a seasonal effect in which the yellow clouds sink deeper into the atmosphere in the winter. Pictures taken from Earth, with Hubble and other telescopes, do show blueness around the edges of the disc, but it's hard to see the winter hemisphere well from Earth because the rings get in the way.
Another note on color expectations: For a long time I thought JPL was exaggerating the blueness in pictures of the ring-shadowed region near the terminator in the northern hemisphere of Saturn; it didn't match old Voyager pictures. I even toned down the blueness in my own color composites.
But the current story is that the pictures really are that blue. It's probably a combination of several things. The blue color here comes from Rayleigh scattering of light by gas, just as it does on Earth. The dominant golden color, on the other hand, comes from the yellow tint of Saturn's clouds. Near the edge of Saturn's disc, we're looking through the atmosphere at a glancing angle and Rayleigh scattering becomes more important; near the terminator, the incoming light is doing the same, with a similar effect.
Finally, the Voyagers encountered Saturn nearer the Saturnian equinox; there may be a seasonal effect in which the yellow clouds sink deeper into the atmosphere in the winter. Pictures taken from Earth, with Hubble and other telescopes, do show blueness around the edges of the disc, but it's hard to see the winter hemisphere well from Earth because the rings get in the way.
Unbundling
Feb. 26th, 2005 05:35 pmAs long as I'm talking about iPods, I ought to note that Apple's vaunted iPod price cuts of the past week are, at least in part, actually unbundlings in much the spirit of the Mac mini (it looks to me as if the value for money really has improved, but this needs to be kept in mind). You don't get as many accessories as you used to. Whether this will bother you depends on how much you want them. It does seem to be a pattern in recent Apple product evolution: they introduce many new models as luxurious bundles (getting the accessories some popular exposure) and then pull accessories out of the bundle later to bring list prices down.
The iPod minis don't even ship with a power brick ($29) any more, which I'd personally find pretty annoying, since in my experience you don't want to be stuck charging only from your computer, even if you can (though I've also heard that the battery life of the recent models is way, way up, so maybe it's not as crucial to have AC charging handy in a pinch).
They now ship with a USB 2.0 cable but no FireWire cable ($19), which makes good bottom-line sense but is bound to cause feelings of abandonment among Mac users, since Apple was late in acknowledging USB 2.0's existence and only relatively new Macs have it (mine doesn't). Expect somebody in the John C. Dvorak mold to tout this as evidence that Apple is discontinuing the Macintosh.
I know the price of the Dock Connector-to-FireWire cable because the lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074 just bought me a second one, so I can carry one for use with the power brick and keep the other attached to my machine (I don't have the Dock). This is nice.
The iPod minis don't even ship with a power brick ($29) any more, which I'd personally find pretty annoying, since in my experience you don't want to be stuck charging only from your computer, even if you can (though I've also heard that the battery life of the recent models is way, way up, so maybe it's not as crucial to have AC charging handy in a pinch).
They now ship with a USB 2.0 cable but no FireWire cable ($19), which makes good bottom-line sense but is bound to cause feelings of abandonment among Mac users, since Apple was late in acknowledging USB 2.0's existence and only relatively new Macs have it (mine doesn't). Expect somebody in the John C. Dvorak mold to tout this as evidence that Apple is discontinuing the Macintosh.
I know the price of the Dock Connector-to-FireWire cable because the lovely
samantha2074 just bought me a second one, so I can carry one for use with the power brick and keep the other attached to my machine (I don't have the Dock). This is nice.A rather Jupiter-looking wide-angle picture taken while crossing the ring plane, in an infrared wavelength sensitive to methane absorption.