Lord of the Rings

The Cassini spacecraft dove through the rings of Saturn yesterday, and sent back its first pictures today. Here you are. These are raw images, and have not been prettified like the Juno pictures. That makes the cyclopean eye of the hurricane even more petrifying!

The other  pictures appear to be a close up of the hurricane, and perhaps a Saturnian cloud formation. Many more pictures are expected before Cassini plunges to its fiery death on 15 th  September. It is hoped that its fiery incineration will keep it from contaminating the Saturnian environment with earthly debris, and even worse, earthly bacteria. We plan to update this post  with  more Saturnian pictures, but hopefully, with no earthly bugs in sight.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Juno and Jupiter 2

Who is the best photographer in the universe? Juno, of course, helped by the magnificent  planetscape it is visiting, and some help from digital enhancement by human hands. The Juno spacecraft of NASA, on its fifth flyby by Jupiter, has sent back stunning pictures on Monday.  Here are two pictures from the flyby

followed by a composite image, composed over four months;

and, not the usual red spot, but a local storm.

Just for comparison, an old one from Voyager 1, also a composite picture ( a similar picture by New Horizons was posted on this blog earlier).

Finally, just for the heck of it, do you think Van Gogh did better?


This blog post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Photos: NASA (Juno Images), Bhagyashree Gupte (Starry Night photo).