Starship Asterisk*

Today's picture of Saturn and its rings can not be the result of a single photography: you don't have to be a geometer to tell that if the plane of the rings and the planes of the bands in the saturn body are parallel, which I think they are, then the rings and the bands can not be inclined the way they are in the picture. Hence this picture is a quite bad construct.

Sorry for my previous message about rings and bands not being parallel in the Saturn picture of today: they are not bands in the body of Saturn, they are the shadow of the rings, so the photography is OK. My apologies

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080720.html

Most pictures of Saturn are simply fascinating with it's stark beauty.

Orin

orin stepanek wrote:Most pictures of Saturn are simply fascinating with it's stark beauty.

http://ciclops.org/ir_index_main/Cassini

Nice views bystander!

Orin

orin stepanek wrote:Nice views bystander

And a ton of them, and well labeled, and a really good variety, and impressive photos.

Images of such unimagined, awe-inspiring beauty evoke in me the scene from the movie "Contact" of Dr. Arrroway, played by Jodie Foster, breaking down, crying, emotionally overwrought by the magnificent view of space she manages to catch a glimpse of during her trip to the Vega system.

Dr. Ellie Arroway wrote:Some celestial event. No - No words. No words to describe it. They should've sent a poet. So beautiful, So beautiful... I had no idea.

Actually, it was not an image of space that she seen during her trip to the Vega system. It was after that just prior to her return. She was taken to a location (undisclosed) where she witnessed something extra-ordinary. That sadly was left to the viewers imagination. My impression (for some reason) was that she was taken to the center of the galaxy

You are right in that the Vega System wasn't the final destination but just the transponder station where the initial message was relayed to earth. Her actual destination was elsewhere and undisclosed in the movie. I don't recall if Segan wrote of the destination location in his work of fiction, it has been quite a while since I read it.
The skyward image on the beach reminded me of one of two possibilities. 1) A galactic center, or 2) the exit/entrance point of the gravitational wormhole that took her there with the other end being centrally located in the electromagnetic ring device on earth.

Or the capsule was a holographic environment, and the shaking of the chair was misdirection so Jodie didn't notice the fast-acting injection that softened her up to buy the time-compressed holographic experience.

How do I explain the 18 hours of recorded nothing? Somebody switched tapes.