So that’s why people go into astronomy
Clearly there is no way that particle physicist are ever going to be able to compete with something like this. I mean, really. We can try all we want with pretty event displays, or CGI pictures of what goes on inside an atom, or simulations of what things look like at a quantum level. But that’s just a really really pretty picture. I guess it’s somehow enhanced and I’m not sure it’s really a proper visible spectrum picture. But even so… Wow.
The description is quite nice. I like how you can see that light reflects off the rings of Saturn to make even the dark side of it bright, and the fact that you can even see the little pale blue dot that is Earth is just sort of icing on the cake.
Advertisement
That’s a wonderful picture of Saturn!
Wow, that is amazing. Seeing pictures like that sort of frees you from the details of your life… we are, after all, only a speck on pale blue speck…
Yeah, I really like that picture. I wonder if Britt has seen it yet?
It’s a portion of a 9×27 mosaic of Cassini WAC (wide-angle-camera) fields. It’s false color, made from UV, IR and clear filter images.
The really interesting thing about it is the E ring, the outermost ring. For one thing, the outer part is reddish and the inner part is bluish—which is what you expect, as smaller particles will be spiralling inward due to Poynting-Robertson drag (a general-relativisitic drag effect caused by the Doppler shift of the particles’ blackbody radiation: the photons the particle emits in the direction of its motion are bluer than those that it emits in the trailing direction, and this asymmetry causes the particle to lose momentum.) But the spooky thing is that if you look carefully, you can see that on the ansae, it’s reddish, but when you look at the part that lies between the observer and Saturn, or the part beyond Saturn, it’s bluish. There’s no obvious explanation for that. It’s probably got something deep to say about the phase functions of paticles of different size.
Thank you Britt. I was hoping you’d provide an explanation of the picture. It did seem like it must be false color.