Starship Asterisk*

jgalt wrote:The hexagonal pattern is caused by a diocotron instability. The magnetic field converges at the poles causing electric current filaments (plasma) to rotate around each other. The distortions occur when two sheets of plasma flow past each other causing them to rotate in pairs and form vortices due to long range attractive electromagnetic forces and short-range repulsive forces.

Steve Dutch wrote:Technical note: two frames is not a time lapse movie.

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Durant wrote:The hexagon is a popular shape in nature ... witness the benzene ring and the compartments in a honeycomb.

TNT wrote:Is the black area a circular frame or space?

APOD Robot wrote:The pole center was not well imaged and has been excluded.

CICLOPS wrote:Imaging team scientists calibrated and stitched together 55 images to create a mosaic and three-frame movie. The mosaics do not show the region directly around the north pole because it had not yet fully emerged from winter night at that time.

Al B wrote:I'd like to believe all things are the same whether it's a whirlpool in the sink, a tornado, hurricane, or galaxy. A drop of oil on the still waters surface or the expansion of the universe. Saturn's hexagon or a snowflake. The only difference is size, so I guess that it does matter.

orin stepanek wrote:don't blink during the movie. or you'll miss it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZAI1LkFlVg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl-Gustaf_Arvid_Rossby wrote:

Dec. 17, 1956 Time

<<Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby (Stockholm 28 December 1898 – Stockholm 19 August 1957) was a Swedish-U.S. meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. Rossby came into meteorology and oceanography while studying under Vilhelm Bjerknes in Bergen in 1919, where Bjerknes' group was developing the concept of polar front, and University of Leipzig. He also studied at the Lindenberg Observatory, Brandenburg where upper air measurements by kite and balloon were researched.

During World War II, Rossby organised the training of military meteorologists, recruiting many of them to his Chicago department in the post-war years where he began adapting his mathematical description of atmospheric dynamics to weather forecasting by electronic computer, having started this actitivites in Sweden using BESK. In 1947 he became founding director of the Institute of Meteorology in Stockholm, dividing his time between there, Chicago and Woods Hole. After the war he visited Professor Hans Ertel, an old friend, in Berlin. Their cooperation led to the mathematical formulation of the socalled Rossby waves. Between 1954 and his death in Stockholm in 1958, he championed and developed the field of atmospheric chemistry.>>

TNT wrote: There should be an apostrophe between the 'n' and 's' in Saturns