Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation

Greetings all, I stumbled across this video on Twitter, its a photographic animation of Cassini's flyby of Saturn, using only the images from the craft, meaning there is no CGI or anything of that nature used, just a seamless mixture of the thousands of images captured by the craft.

To see this unfold before your eyes as a space traveler would just evokes an awe that only film can do. I only hope that one day NASA and the guys at JPL will find a way to place good cameras aboard their craft as they go and see these jaw-dropping heavenly bodies. While an image is worth a thousand words, a video tells a whole story, and the filmmaker does a masterful job at showing us what we are missing. Anyway, here's the video:


And here is the link to the filmmaker's website. Apparently the goal is to make an IMAX movie from his work, which I am already in line for . But anyway, Why don't you think NASA is utilizing video cameras on their craft? I don't think weight is an issue with digital cameras, but at this link NASA only says that Curiosity's video capacity will be used for the landing. Maybe transmission issues, or since this is ATS, a more sinister reason? Don't know, but enjoy,SNIP

reply to post by wjones837


Beautiful and Breath-taking !!

I feared for the safety of my space craft, as it flew through the rings of Saturn. It was that realistic !!

It was like being there. Like being an astronaut in a space ship.
And the music fitted the visuals perfectly.

Wow, that was a great experience.
Thanks OP. (S and F.)

It's so strange how fake and smooth Saturn looks in every photo. Very nice video.

reply to post by wjones837


Thank you for posting this video, it looks amazing!

Transmitting video from space (especially from far away in the Solar System) is a big load on the bandwidth and energy consumption of the spacecraft. For science, still images are sufficient, so that takes the priority. They sometimes make videos out of a succession of stills, for example the recent video from GRAIL, or the Curiosity descent video. I think the only true video from outside of the Earth's orbit (and not counting the Apollo transmitions) was taken by the Japanese SELENE (KAGUYA) orbiter around the Moon.



I hope that with the advance of technology we will get real high-fps videos from deep space missions.

P.S. Another point I want to make, spacecraft journeys to and around the planets take a very long time. A normal video during such a trip would be almost like a still picture. So it makes more sense to take images every few minutes or hours and then turn them into a video.

Nice vid, it was taking a trip at a better Disneyworld than the one we have. This thead inspired me to have a good read of the wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org...–Huygens interesting data there and here. Go to that page and click on Cassini-Huygens, it seems the hyphen doesn't register on this link. Thanks.

prove that this wasn't just whipped up on some dirt cheap software package.
'cause it sure looks like it was.

no stars to be seen as usual.

the thing about starting out on a big lie is that it must be continued,
and it only becomes harder and harder to convince everyone.

NASA wouldn't know how to start out on a big lie, would they?

reply to post by wjones837

Greetings all, I stumbled across this video on Twitter, its a photographic animation of Cassini's flyby of Saturn, using only the images from the craft, meaning there is no CGI or anything of that nature used, just a seamless mixture of the thousands of images captured by the craft.

They don't have cameras on Cassini that show us what it would look like out there to our eyes and those images they strung together are themselves only artistic interpretations. There is no colour in the rings that you would see if you were out there where Cassini is. The Imaging Science Subsystem (or ISS) has been around for quite a while now, CCDs instead of the Vidicon tube now though. They don't take video cameras I believe, because there is so little light, and what 'light' there is could not be focused by the lenses in a stock video camera. It would be a waste of time to take a video camera into deep space. NASA has always struggled with video in space, and the main tube in the early Apollo video cameras was Classified. They had to get special permission to use them.
Also, light does not reflect off a gas, so even Saturn itself is only being seen by the specral emissions from the ionisation of gases in the atmosphere. And when they say 'colour'm the accepted meaning of that is an image that uses 3 wavelengths of spectra, even if those wavelengths are IR or UV or X-ray even. When they say the images are in visible light, they really mean the spectral emissions of the Methane, for example, are in the visible portion of the spectrum, but they would not be visible to your eyes, it is the wrong type of light for our eyes to be able to detect, our lenses, like a video camera lens, just won't register it.

Withe the famous Voyager "Pale Blue Dot" images, you will notice that the Earth was imaged when it was behind one of the rings (which would not be visible by eye) as this is what makes Earth visible, rather than obscuring it. Very clever stuff, NASA. But where are the stars? Washed out by Earths brightness?
en.wikipedia.org...ale_Blue_Dot.png
en.wikipedia.org...aleBlueDot.jpg

"What our cameras do is miraculous really. They convert the fleeting and indifferent fluctuations of electric and magnetic fields into powerful emotion," Porco says. "Who can fail to be moved when seeing some of our beautiful images? Certainly not I."

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

So NASA employs how many artists now?

With Selene, I have been looking for specs of the HDTV camera, but not much available. I did see that it does a single shot, long exposure mode, so I suspect that is how they got the video, it is not a 'real time' stream, but another animation.

Originally posted by OutonaLimb
no stars to be seen as usual.

It has to do with camera exposure. If you set your camera to properly expose sunlit objects, then star light will be to faint to be exposed.

NASA wouldn't know how to start out on a big lie, would they?

This doesn't have anything to do with NASA directly. This is being done by some people outside of NASA from what I understand.

However with that said, the images may be real, but I'm almost certain that the camera flythough itself isn't.

Originally posted by wjones837
Why don't you think NASA is utilizing video cameras on their craft?

Power consumption, bandwidth limitations etc. These probes are dedicated to scientific instruments. A video camera, while good for PR, adds nothing of scientific value and could take up space on a probe that could have been otherwise been used for another scientific instrument.

Here is a video that uses only raw Cassini images. vimeo.com...

reply to post by GaryN

Something wonky with the board today, but here are the corrected links for the Pale Blue Dot images:

Originally posted by GaryN
Withe the famous Voyager "Pale Blue Dot" images, you will notice that the Earth was imaged when it was behind one of the rings (which would not be visible by eye) as this is what makes Earth visible, rather than obscuring it

Huh?! What rings? Voyager 1 was about 6 billion KM from Earth at the time of that photo. That puts it past the orbit of Pluto.

reply to post by wjones837


Those images used in the video look artificial to me.

reply to post by jra


This page has the images I was referring to.
en.wikipedia.org...

@michael1983l

Those images used in the video look artificial to me.

Yeah, something sure isn't right about the 'video'.

Originally posted by GaryN
This page has the images I was referring to.
en.wikipedia.org...

Ok... but that doesn't answer my question. What rings were you referring to in the "pale blue dot" photo? Certainly not Saturn's rings I hope (for reasons already mentioned in my previous post).

reply to post by GaryN


en.wikipedia.org...
"The picture was taken at 32° above the ecliptic and it was created using blue, green, and violet filters with exposure times for each filter being 0.72, 0.48 and 0.72 seconds respectively. In the photograph, the light band over Earth is an artifact: sunlight is scattering off parts of the camera and its sunshade."

Originally posted by OutonaLimb
prove that this wasn't just whipped up on some dirt cheap software package.
'cause it sure looks like it was.

no stars to be seen as usual.

the thing about starting out on a big lie is that it must be continued,
and it only becomes harder and harder to convince everyone.

NASA wouldn't know how to start out on a big lie, would they?

Feel free to go to saturn.jpl.nasa.gov... and make your own movie from the raw images. Here's one I just made out of images of the moon Iapetus flyby: i.picasion.com... And here's one of the Saturn's pole vortex: i.picasion.com...

reply to post by jra

Ok... but that doesn't answer my question. What rings were you referring to in the "pale blue dot" photo? Certainly not Saturn's rings I hope (for reasons already mentioned in my previous post).

Yeah I jumped to conclusions there, I saw the pale blue dot on an image search page and never read the article, just thought those were rings! My bad. So I learned something from my errors myway, learning is always good.
However, the NAC and WAC should both be considered as spectrographic imagers, and the filter chart you linked to shows sulphur and methane filters, so what colour are those?
Most likely the blue and violet filters were for the Balmer lines on hydrogen.
en.wikipedia.org...
Reflected light off the Earth could not, IMO, reach those distances, so how 'light' travels that far means, to me, that the mechanism must involve plane wave beam and spacial soliton considerations. The simplistic, high-school model of light travelling as wavy rays only works for the transverse light model, but can not explain the observation of very distant objects.
This PhD thesis is quite informative, also quite complicated, but might explain how 'light' can travel long distances in the vacuum of space.
ebookbrowse.com...

reply to post by GaryN


Gary,
I am not sure I got this correct from your earlier posts but it seemed to me that you were saying the rings of Saturn are not visable to the eye in space?

I hope I am reading that wrong.

Originally posted by GaryN
However, the NAC and WAC should both be considered as spectrographic imagers...

But they're not. Their are other instruments on the Voyagers that are spectrometers.

Anyway. I feel that we're dragging this thread way off topic. Perhaps it would be best if you started your own thread that deals with your theory of how light works in space, rather than derailing this one or any others?

Originally posted by Dragoon01
reply to post by GaryN

 

Gary,
I am not sure I got this correct from your earlier posts but it seemed to me that you were saying the rings of Saturn are not visable to the eye in space?

I hope I am reading that wrong.

Well unless they take a telescope to orbit or the ISS and give it a try, we'll never know, but i'll stick with my guns and say that the rings will not be visible by eye or a regular camera or telescope.

@jra

Anyway. I feel that we're dragging this thread way off topic.

The OP asked:

Maybe transmission issues, or since this is ATS, a more sinister reason?

So I'm trying to explain that NASA, as usual, is not giving us the straight goods, and the reason they don't take (ordinary) video cameras out there is that they just don't work with the type or intensity of light available in space.

reply to post by GaryN


A spectrograph doesn't produce images that look like photos, it splits the light into a spectrum. en.wikipedia.org...



The vidicon cameras on the Voyager were not spectrographs, they were regular digital cameras (before the advent of CCD). Spectrographs were separate instruments on the Voyager.