Starship Asterisk*

What would happen if someone took the rings of Saturn and transposed them onto a CD or DVD and tried to play them?

Would there be a sound one could listen to or is this the wrong way of thinking about how a CD or DVD is recorded?

I know it's a bit silly but someone might have thought of this before or even tried it.

Anyone up to the challenge?

OOOOOOOOOOO000000000OOOOOOO

*********SPAMMER ALERT*******

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html

Why is the entire disk of Saturn visible? Why is there no occlusion by the rings?

It seems that perhaps Pandora was cropped out of my version of the 10-23-07 apod? I found tiny Mimas and Janus (almost hidden by bits of lint on my screen) as stated in the text, but no Pandora. Am I the only one who can't find Pandora?

It's in the gap between the outermost visible ring and the rest of the ring system, closer to 9 than 8.

I retract that, Pandora is indeed at 8, just outside the F ring. That must be Prometheus on the inside of the F ring at 9.

It wouldn't work, Dome. For one, say you have an old record... that groove is actually a big spiral. And if you look reeeeally close at one, you get this:
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recordi ... gure5.html

CDs and DVDs I guess work in a similar way but they use pits... Here's a closeup of a CD along with an article:
http://www.stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/

You miiight perhaps be able to put it on a record but for sure you would get nothing out of a CD or DVD. Data has to be organized. You can't just randomly plop some pits on a DVD or CD and hope something comes out. The bits have to be arranged to form bytes and those bytes have to correspond to something. You have to know where the start and end of each file is by using a special area of the disc to tell it where those are.

bystander: if you look at the closeup, you'll see that they are occluding it. They're pretty translucent. It's just easier to see them against the black of space.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071023.html

I had to blow the photo up to 400% to find any other moon; but they're there.
Orin

bystander wrote:It's in the gap between the outermost visible ring and the rest of the ring system, closer to 9 than 8.

Good eye! Yes, I found it! Thanks! I just hate it when moons go AWOL, so am glad this didn't happen here.

bystander wrote:I retract that, Pandora is indeed at 8, just outside the F ring. That must be Prometheus on the inside of the F ring at 9.

Yes again! I've now found all four! Thank you!

Those moons sure are small. Or should I say Saturn sure is big?

Great Close ups.

Thanks for the clarification.

geckzilla wrote:Those moons sure are small. Or should I say Saturn sure is big?

'Big' is all about comparison. Compared to our Moon, Mimas - the biggest one in the picture and actually showing a phase - has a diameter that is only about 11% of our Moon. Quite small indeed.

It might press into vinyl though. And if you play it as 78rpm you find the chipmunks singing "christmas tree"

it would be possible although the rings of saturn aren't thin with easily discernable bumps and dips like you would find on a record. If you did make an audio image though, it'd most certainly just be static with the clicks and pops representing some of the larger pieces of debris. I bet NASA or other astronomy interest groups would pay good money for it too.

The Soundtrack to Saturn by Galactic Groove

I could not make out Janus nor Pandora in the APOD image and was only able to see them in the 572.6kB version of PIA08388 in the JPL Photojournal website that was brought up through a link in the explanation(I did not even attempt to try the 44.11MB version). To say Pandora is faint is an understatement!.
The explanation to the APOD gives the impression that all 3 moons are readily visible in the APOD image, but that is clearly not the case. I think it would have been better not to have not mentioned the moons in the explanation. The image otherwise is superb.

DavidLeeds wrote:I could not make out Janus nor Pandora.

The image on the page is 842x600; the click-through image is 4824x3048, 5 times bigger. Maybe this will help you find 'em:

The moons are easier to spot in their blackness environment than in these crop-outs. I also inverted them to improve faint visibility.


__________________________
Edit: Wow, the TIF file revealed even more bodies around Saturn.

But wait! There is one possibility of getting a sound out of the rings. Imagine instead of spinning them running a stylus across them. At the proper speed or frequency, it is possible that some type of tones would be created much like the noise that car tires make on groomed pavement or on steel bridge roadways.
The pitch would depend on the spacing between rings and the speed from ring to ring. It would be just clicks at a slow speed but could become more musical at a higher speed. By varying the speed... oh my god... it might just start to sound like part of a style of "music" that I don't care for at all - having been born a generation too early!

bystander wrote:Why is the entire disk of Saturn visible? Why is there no occlusion by the rings?

Pardon me if this seems obvious... Same reason Cassini could fly right through them: They're rather sparse and thin.

The reason they're so prominent (and thus seem substantial in most photos) is that ice crystals are pretty good at reflecting light.

-Noel

NoelC wrote:Pardon me if this seems obvious... Same reason Cassini could fly right through them: They're rather sparse and thin.

I disagree. If they are dense enough to cause a shadow, they are dense enough for partial occlusion. There is, in fact, an occlusion at the bottom of the picture. Faint, but it is there. I think that if there was no occlusion, it would be more a case of the backlighting from Saturn overwhelming it.