Monday, October 13, 2008

What The Hell Is It?

This looks to me like something in a petri dish or perhaps an ultrasound...

cassini_vortex 1.jpg


But Bad Astronomy calls it Your Cassini awesomeness for today. "What you’re looking at is an incredibly detailed image of Saturn’s south pole (with ten times better resolution than any image taken before), taken by the Cassini spacecraft. It was taken from an angle, but then mathematically 'deprojected' to make it look like you are hovering over the pole and looking down." Here's the original image.

"In fact, the entire gigantic vortex — it’s 4000 km (2500 miles) across, folks — is a convection feature. The relatively clear center indicates this is warm air, which makes it similar to the eye of a hurricane on Earth. However, on Earth, convection occurs only at a hurricane’s eyewall, with the eye itself free of convections and clouds. But the clouds in the middle of this Saturnian region indicate convection is happening on smaller scales there too… meaning the analog of this region to a hurricane only goes so far."

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