Saturn animation, Jan 5

[bird]

Ok, so last night I used shorter individual runs with the idea that I could look for cloud features and maybe make an animation if I found anything.

Well, I found lots of features! Here's the GIF animation showing 3 frames. This is red channel data only. The times given are the centre of each run - the runs were 3 minutes each.

The animation is 214kb, too large to upload, so here's a link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20090105-anim/s20090105-173846-175145-180354.gif

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Nice work Anthony! Lots to see there. A storm and a shadow?

[Kevnool]

Great work Bird lots of detail in there including the storm....cheers Kev.

[Lester]

That really brings out the moving detail, I can see you doing what Trevor is doing with tracking storms on Saturn for science.

All the best Anthony.

[bird]

Mike, I don't know what the bright region is that shows just under the rings, maybe it's one of the moons? I'll have to check and see...

Bird

[Quark]

Hi Bird,

Great work, the storm is at Lat 35 Sth, this region has been dubbed Storm Alley.

The bright spot under the rings and shadow looks like a moon.
Have checked your times against my ephemeris, if the mid point of your final capture was 18:04 UTC then the storm is at approx Long 74 degrees. The central meridian at 18:10 UTC was Long 76.768 degrees.

These storm structures definitely show up better in the red channel at the moment and your shorter capture periods resolve this very nicely.

Congratulations on this effort.

Regards
Trevor

PS: Dave Herald just forwarded you email to me, I will email all of the info you need.

[allan gould]

Excellent animation. Really nice

[bird]

Yes, I thought so too - problem is, I can't find one at that time... am I doing something wrong?

regards, Bird

[Quark]

Hi Bird,

Have been checking it out with "The Sky" and as you say, none of the major moons are transiting the disk at the time of your captures.

It has to be one of the smaller inner moons. I think Atlas and Pan would be way to small to image but it could be Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus or Janus. Janus is the largest of these inner moon at 220 x 200 x 160 km.

I thought that maybe, the ephemeris generator might help and I called up data for these moons for the time of your imaging, however I am unsure how to interpret the positional data for them, relative to Saturn, you may have better luck. I have never had cause to use the moon data for Saturn before.

Regarding your animation, the movement of the moon seems well synchronized with the a feature at about Lat 35 Nth, which would be the moons shadow, however there is another feature at approx Lat 35 Nth that clearly precedes the moons shadow. This is most interesting, due to the differential rotation there appears to be special regions about 35 degrees Sth and Nth of the equator where the wind speeds reduce just enough for storm structure to form and survive.

Since Cassini has been at Saturn the rings have been tilted to the Nth so most of the storm structure has been imaged from Earth in the 35 Sth "Storm Alley region. However now the rings are closing they are giving us better access to the 35 Nth region. I suspect that you may have captured storm activity at both 35 Sth and Nth in these images. It will be interesting to see how Georg interprets this data and whether the current orbit of Cassini allows the RPWS instrument to provide data for this region.

Regards
Trevor

[alphajuno]

Very nice capture and animation. I'm intrigued with the mystery too. Thanks.

[Jen]

:thumbsup::thumbsup: That looks really cool Bird keep em coming cheers :thumbsup: