Celestia Forums

I photographed the eclipse projected on the ground by trees in Barcelona, where it was partial but the crescent got fairly thin. You can see a picture here: http://pics.livejournal.com/mmcirvin/pic/000112bc Most people on the street probably had no idea anything unusual was happening. The light got ...

Objects tend to group in planes because their gravity pulls on each other. Whenever one of the objects is above or below the plane, all the others that are still near the plane are pulling it back toward the plane. A similar effect makes Saturn's rings so thin and flat. Saturn has a bulging equator...

I like to make Celestia look as accurate as possible, but I can never decide which star style makes it look most accurate. I figure it's "scaled discs", but they look way too bright, it's definitely not "points" because they look way too dim, and "fuzzy points" seems like I'm viewing them from Eart...

So, reading those, would I be right in assuming that the atmospheric composition is actually irrelevant to the colour of the sky? i.e. it doesn't matter what gases the atmosphere is made of - so long as there are no particulates, aerosols, hazes, dust particles etc - then the sky will always be blu...

It seems to me that it was known there was some sort of problem with one of the oxygen tanks before the launch, but they still went ahead and used it. 8O It wasn't thought to be a problem that would have any effect on space operations. But combined with several other minor mishaps that fell exactly...

The bubble has the Sun at its center, no? I'm thinking it's just a set of stars that have rounded-off distance values due to imprecise data. Stellar distances are extremely hard to measure.

Backlit atmosphere (red/green/blue/violet visible light composite)

Raw images are up now!

Hastily-done enhancement of a wide-angle-camera picture of the Lying H

I just downloaded this in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the discovery of Titan. It's nice!

However, around the same time, Cassini did get some nice shots of Rhea, Dione, Mimas and the rings in the same frame. I made a rough color composite (moon positions taken from the blue-filter image; Mimas was out of frame for the red, so I duplicated the green-channel data).

Some crescent-Enceladus pictures up now, and some of Tethys too. It looks like they've got some fairly detailed shots looking down into Ithaca Chasma on Tethys, though they won't look that good until somebody can take care of the lossless-compression-buffer-overflow dropouts (I'll probably try my ha...

This picture really is of Dione and Tethys. Interesting comparison of the trailing hemispheres of both... Dione's is much darker.

They've got a huge number of raw images up there now. It looks as if there are still more to come, as the latest ones are near closest approach. There are supposed to be some new, best-ever Tethys images in store, too.

For curiosity, I have made a 8k texture from that Saturn composite right after it had appeared about a weak ago (Feb 24th). It's very easy to do. However, the gain in detail is not very dramatic and hence I dumped that project soon after. I am not worried by the change of cloud details with time. A...

Based on my own experiments compositing Cassini raw images, I suspect that these pictures of Iapetus that show the dark Cassini Regio as chocolate-brown are not actually visible-light composites. I think they're IR/green/UV composites. If you use the pictures taken through the red-green-blue filters...

Thanks for the explanation, Anders; I had always wondered precisely what the difficulty was.

As for the lack of high-res coverage of most of Titan, that's because the pictures simply don't exist yet. I suppose somebody could try incorporating the few radar swaths of the northern reaches into a Titan map, but the detailed infrared imagery has been limited to the area that is sunlit during th...

I am getting bored.There were lots of new pictures of Rhea,Enceladus,Iapetus and no update in the textures. t00fri,the weekend had passed and no Iapetus texture.I thought that the texture was almost ready... The Titan new texture was OK,but the problem is many places has ultra low resolution.Only X...

Just checked on this in Celestia... This is the side of Rhea opposite the "wisps". The big crater near the top is Tirawa, which has a name because one of the Voyagers managed to see half of it. The bright rayed crater that Cassini imaged on a couple of occasions is hidden in the overexposed area.

I can only see Saturnshine on the smaller moon, the one that passes behind the other moon. But I need to brighten it in Photoshop. Then I can see it in both pictures. The reason you can only see the Saturnshine on Rhea is that Dione is in front of Saturn and Rhea is behind Saturn! Rhea is actually ...