cool pic of Saturn

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mwmorph

Diamond Member
Dec 27, 2004
8,877
1
81
Originally posted by: ForumMaster
cool pic! too big for my desktop though. and i don't want streching.

if you run a decent resolution, just set as desktop and then select center image instead of stretch image. at 16x12, it looks great, the rings are exactly in the picture. I guess it would work decently at 12x10 but any less and you'd have to resize it.
 

Vegitto

Diamond Member
May 3, 2005
5,234
1
0
Originally posted by: Injury
Originally posted by: Vegitto

If the Earth is such a small dot when you're orbiting a planet IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, how do we expect aliens possibly living dozens of lightyears away to notice our tiny, tiny blue dot?



If they've accomplished the goal of travelling from one solar system to the next, I could only assume that finding a way to detect planets and determine if they have advanced forms of life is a minor acheivement.

I'm not of the persuasion that aliens visit us, but I have no trouble believing that life exists on other planets. Look at every star in the sky. There's no way that none of those stars have their own planets, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them! The hundreds of stars you can see on a clear night isn't even a taste of the number that have been recorded through the use of technology, and of the potential billions upon billions of planets, the odds that not a single one of them have seen some form of life is "astronomical".

I absolutely, positively believe that sentient aliens already exist, but to be able to notice us possibly hundreds of lightyears away means that they have technology that's scary, quite frankly. I wonder if other intelligent lifeforms would ponder what the meaning of life was..
 

0

Golden Member
Jul 22, 2003
1,270
0
0
Originally posted by: Leros
Originally posted by: Vegitto

If the Earth is such a small dot when you're orbiting a planet IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, how do we expect aliens possibly living dozens of lightyears away to notice our tiny, tiny blue dot?

...exactly

They won't come here until they detect our first warp signatures.. (i.e. where's Zephram Cochrane when you need him!).
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Originally posted by: ScottSwingleComputers

Wrong dot. Its the bright one, on the left side, directly above the bright colored rings. About 4 inches away from your dot.

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/ScottSwingleComputers/newrings_cassini_big.jpg

ScottSwingle is correct. The circled dot is Earth.

Closeup at NASA's site. There's even a hint of the Moon in this image.
 

sao123

Lifer
May 27, 2002
12,656
207
106
Originally posted by: Jeff7
Originally posted by: ScottSwingleComputers

Wrong dot. Its the bright one, on the left side, directly above the bright colored rings. About 4 inches away from your dot.

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/ScottSwingleComputers/newrings_cassini_big.jpg

ScottSwingle is correct. The circled dot is Earth.

Closeup at NASA's site. There's even a hint of the Moon in this image.


and the thing that I circled...that would be???
Somones pocket lint?
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Originally posted by: sao123

and the thing that I circled...that would be???
Somones pocket lint?

You drew an arrow to something, not circled. :)


That could be a star, or perhaps a moon, or just a cosmic ray hit on the CCD. They get plenty of the latter outside the safety of a planet's magnetic field.
They also take 3 exposures, at least, to get approximate RGB color. The Mars Exploration Rovers will take 7-filter images, which are then calibrated and combined for an approximate true-color image. Cassini operates in similar fashion - a B&W CCD with a filter wheel, which can be turned to allow through a number of different wavelengths, from IR to UV.

So that little really blue dot that you pointed out was likely just something that happened to be glinting sunlight while the blue filter was in place.


Example of what I mean. I took raw images (JPEG only, and not calibrated), and combined them into a color composite, and enlarged it 2x. In the time it took for Cassini to take the 3 exposures needed for a color picture, Titan, the considerably larger, more distant moon, shifted slightly, as did Enceladus, though the latter shifted more, as I believe Titan was the target of this image set. Note that there are red, green, and blue edges visible on Enceladus. They aren't as pronounced on Titan, in part due to the way its atmosphere scatters various wavelengths, but they are visible near the sides of the crescent.

Raw JPEGs:
N00049968.jpg
N00049967.jpg
N00049966.jpg


A similar effect occured with Mars Rover Spirit, when it would take color panoramas in the Martian summer. Sometimes a dust devil would move across the image. So Spirit would take an image in red, the dust devil would move a bit, then another picture in green, more dust devil motion, then blue. The result would be at least 3 dust devils (depending on how many filters were being used), one in each color, overlaid on an otherwise normal-looking color image.
 

Injury

Lifer
Jul 19, 2004
13,066
2
81
Originally posted by: Vegitto
Originally posted by: Injury
Originally posted by: Vegitto

If the Earth is such a small dot when you're orbiting a planet IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, how do we expect aliens possibly living dozens of lightyears away to notice our tiny, tiny blue dot?



If they've accomplished the goal of travelling from one solar system to the next, I could only assume that finding a way to detect planets and determine if they have advanced forms of life is a minor acheivement.

I'm not of the persuasion that aliens visit us, but I have no trouble believing that life exists on other planets. Look at every star in the sky. There's no way that none of those stars have their own planets, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them! The hundreds of stars you can see on a clear night isn't even a taste of the number that have been recorded through the use of technology, and of the potential billions upon billions of planets, the odds that not a single one of them have seen some form of life is "astronomical".

I absolutely, positively believe that sentient aliens already exist, but to be able to notice us possibly hundreds of lightyears away means that they have technology that's scary, quite frankly. I wonder if other intelligent lifeforms would ponder what the meaning of life was..

I don't think the human brain will ever be capable of realizing exactly how much there actually is out there. It's a mindfvck just thinking about it.
 

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,703
12
81
Originally posted by: Vegitto
I absolutely, positively believe that sentient aliens already exist, but to be able to notice us possibly hundreds of lightyears away means that they have technology that's scary, quite frankly. I wonder if other intelligent lifeforms would ponder what the meaning of life was..

We're on the verge of detecting earth-sized planets orbiting other stars...