Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Saturn, Enceladus and Dione: An animation


Click the above picture to view the animation.

Cassini followed Enceladus for a period on March 3rd, 2006 and watched as it passed in front of Dione. Transits and occultations like this happen a lot if you are in the equatorial plane. I retrieved the raw images from Cassini's site, cropped and resized the images in Irfanview using its batch conversion process, and animated it with ImageReady.

You can browse the images on Cassini's site and see that you can query by main target, but the raw images won't identify the additional moons visible. I used the JPL Solar System Simulator to identify Dione in this animation.


I processed one of the original images
to remove cosmic ray hits and other instrumental and download artifacts.

Individual frames in the animation are Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

P.S. Ha! It turns out Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society did the same exact thing. She's been animating this stuff for a while

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