3:00 AM
Astronomy Pirate
CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo.
[You'll probably want to watch this with HD and full screen turned on.]
This is footage from the Cassini Imaging Science System by the hard workers at NASA. The Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn for nearly 7 years now, tracking moons, rings, and the planet. Many thousands of images have been sent back to Earth and have been enjoyed by the public over the past few years.
Videographer Chris Abbas got the idea to string them together into a video. The result was an eerily beautiful look at the sixth planet using raw, unprocessed data. You can see some of the 'defects' that astronomers tend to work around since it gets in the way of the science being done. But in the case of art, the dark donuts created by dust in the camera, cosmic rays hitting the detector, and imperfections in the camera itself; they all add to the beauty of things.
Abbas included a quote of Carl Sagan with the video, a quote that inspiring with this video:
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
(If you have problems getting the embedded Vimeo video to play, you can watch the video here.)
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