We’ve already been treated to spectacular black and white closeup images of Saturn, beamed home to Earth by the Cassini spacecraft after it dove between the planet and its rings. Now, we’re getting to see what things look like in true color.
Among the first of these images is the one above, processed by Sophia Nasr, an astro-particle physicist working on dark matter. She will begin her PhD studies in physics at UC Irvine in September 2017. (For her full bio, see the end of this post.) I first spotted Nasr’s image on Twitter, where she may be posting more. You can find her here: https://twitter.com/Pharaoness
SEE ALSO: Cassini shoots through the gap between Saturn and its rings, returning the closest views ever of the planet
That striking, sky-blue feature is the eye of a persistent hurricane at Saturn’s north pole. The feature is 1,200 miles across, about 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. And clouds are swirling around it as fast as 330 miles per hour.
The striking cerulean color is not at all false. It comes from scattering of sunlight, the same phenomenon that produces a blue sky here on Earth.
To produce the image, Nasr used Photoshop to combine three photographs taken using blue, green and red filters. With a little additional tweaking of contrast and other factors, Nasr produced something akin to what the scene would look like to our eyes if we were hitching a ride on Cassini.
Just as an aside, I actually dreamed last night that I was doing just that. It was quite the wild ride (considering that we were moving at 77,000 miles per hour — Cassini’s actual speed as it zoomed between Saturn and its innermost ring). But in my dream, the eye was blood red, probably because I had seen false-color images of it before (shot in near-infrared wavelengths). So when I woke up and found Nasr’s image on Twitter, I was amazed.
Here’s an animation of the images Nasr used — red, green, blue — and concluding with the natural color result:
