Saturn storm animation 25/01/2009

[Quark]

Hi All,

This is an animation of five "R" channel images from this morning. Each image represents the best 600 of 2000 frames.

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/uploads/SatAnim240109

Thanks for looking
Regards
Trevor

[iceman]

Excellent, Trevor. Lots of activity there. Moons or storms?

[renormalised]

Good animation, Trevor:)

[Quark]

Hi Mike,

I have been imaging Saturn on and off since the end of November, when requested to do so.
Over the last 4-5 weeks I have been regularly imaging a bright white spot in the EZn. I send all of my data to Georg Fischer at The Austrian Academy of Sciences. Georg contacts our team from time to time to survey particular regions for him, when his RPWS instrument on board Cassini picks up activity. We are currently surveying the long 300-350 degree region, where there may be possibly, multiple storms.

My images from Jan 20th included a bright white spot in the EZn region, it was brighter than the one in the same region in this mornings images. I thought it was an inner moon however Georg believes that it is an equatorial cloud system and he says it has been imaged previously.

The white spots in the SEBZ and STrZ are more interesting and may be storm activity. With the time difference between Broken Hill and Graz in Austria, Georg should be looking at my data at about 7pm CSST tomorrow night, which will be about 9am Monday morning, when he goes into his office. If Georgs analysis concludes that these are new storms I will post the info.

Regards
Trevor

[lesbehrens]

wow:eyepop:, thats pretty cool.
les

[Kirkus]

That is just outrageous! Very nice!

[matt]

Well done, Trevor.

I think you may have also captured Enceladus off the western side of the ring plane, moving in toward the planet.

[Quark]

Thanks Matt,

I believe that moon to be Tethys. Checked it out with "The Sky 6".

In identifying the moons in my images you have to disregard the date I have put on them. I send my data to Georg Fischer and he needs to know the UTC time and date. As I am imaging after midnight local time, my date changes however the date relative to the UTC day has not changed and doesn't change until the UTC time ticks past 23:59 UTC. At 00:01 UTC the date changes to the next day.

This means to accurately identify detail on Saturn, cloud features or storms, when imaging in the early hours of the morning, you need to create an ephemeris for the date before midnight local time.

As my planetarium program works on my lat & long and local time it has to be used for my local date & time to identify moons that may be in my images, not the UTC date that I label them with.

Regards
Trevor

[Kevnool]

Nice Trev loads of detail in there.
Good to see someone working away whilst another has gone away for a few days.
Cheers and catch up with you soon.....Kev.