Saturn Wallpaper
A friend pointed me toward a huge mosaic of Saturn constructed from 126 images taken from the Cassini space probe. The image is huge, so I chopped it up and created this image which works nicely as a desktop background. I cropped the image and flipped it to make it’s appearance more attractive beneath your stock quotes and e-mail messages.
Provided as a 24–bit lossless PNG. You may need to convert this to a BMP on Windows, a JPG or PICT file on the Mac.
What’s so cool is that the Solar System Simulator lets you see this. Since the picture was supposedly taken on Oct 6, 2004, I punched that in and got this image:
The tilt of Saturn seems right, but the day/night position (the terminator, for you astro-geeks) seems off, doesn’t it? I suppose that the probe could be rotated and the SSS is depicting a perfect North is Up kind of image, but still I suppose there is an error somewhere. The probe took the picture from the left or right of this image.
Just to prove to everyone that I’m a complete geek, I simulated the Cassini scene, as best I could on the date in question, and provide this simulated image using Starry Night:
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