ext_17567 ([identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] mmcirvin 2005-02-23 06:18 am (UTC)

Also, that occultation sequence in the summer looks like it should produce some of the prettiest pictures of Saturn taken so far, something like the famous Voyager parting shot (http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=2121) that you've seen a million times, only much higher-resolution, and with a thinner crescent Saturn and the rings backlit (the thick B ring looks dark from that angle, and thinner parts of the rings stand out as relatively bright). Classic science-fiction-cover-painting stuff, in other words. Though what I'm really looking forward to in that department are the super-high-inclination shots from the Titan 180 transfer in late '06, and the nearly polar orbit in '08.

(When I was a kid I liked drawing pictures of spaceships, and they got more and more detailed over time. I remember at one point in my adolescence imagining a massive manned expedition to Saturn on a ship that I named the Huygens—if the name of the proposed Titan lander had been chosen yet I didn't know it, though it's a pretty obvious name choice for anything going to Saturn—anyway, it went into a polar orbit so I could draw pictures of Saturn seen from above the poles.)

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