Amazing pictures of Saturn's spongy moon Hyperion

CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE






Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

This stunning false-color view of Saturn's moon Hyperion reveals
crisp details across the strange, tumbling moon's surface.
Differences in color could represent differences in the composition
of surface materials. The view was obtained during Cassini's close
flyby on Sept. 26, 2005.


Hyperion has a notably reddish tint when viewed in natural color.
The red color was toned down in this false-color view, and the
other hues were enhanced, in order to make more subtle color
variations across Hyperion's surface more apparent.


Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters
were combined to create this view. The images were taken with the
Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at a distance of
approximately 62,000 kilometers (38,500 miles) from Hyperion and at
a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The image
scale is 362 meters (1,200 feet) per pixel.





Well big piccy
here

This high-resolution Cassini mosaic shows that Hyperion truly has a
surface different from any other in the Saturn system.




The mosaic is composed of five clear filter images taken during
Cassini's close flyby of Hyperion on Sept. 26, 2005. The spacecraft
passed approximately 500 kilometers (310 miles) above the moon's
surface. Hyperion is 266 kilometers (165 miles) in diameter.

Scientists are extremely curious to learn what the dark material is
that fills many craters on this oddball moon. Features within the
dark terrain, including a 200-meter-wide (650-foot) impact crater
surrounded by rays to the right of center and numerous bright-rimmed
craters, indicate that the dark material may be only tens of meters
(hundreds of feet) thick with brighter material beneath.


SOURCE: SPACEFLIGHTNOW.COM

http://www.sciencephoto.com/search/s...=84&country=67

I saw this at snopes.com, disputing the fact that the photos that we saw were NOT Katrina clouds... but from other storms: NOT Katrina Clouds

The cloud formations were very beautiful, but it looks like they weren't from Katrina after all. (Sorry LK )

If you don't have time to click on the link, here's the commentary:

Origins: When readers started forwarding these photographs to us just after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005, our first thought was that the scenes depicted in these images didn't look like either a hurricane or the Gulf Coast. Our second thought was that we've seen these pictures before — many times.

Indeed, these pictures are apparently all-purpose storm photos, trotted out on a near monthly basis and retitled to correspond to the latest large weather phenomenon. These photographs have now been circulated as depicting:

* Australian tornadoes, May 2005

* Severe storms in southern Alberta, July 2005

* Severe storms and tornadoes in Ontario, August 2005

* Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama), August 2005

These images are actually photographs of tornadoes and other extreme weather phenomena taken by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas during the summer months of 2002 and 2004. Some of these photos are viewable on the 2004 Digital Photos section of his web site (scroll about halfway down the page).

Cripes !..thanks Arkansaslegs for clearing that up. Clicking on the site reveals some rather spiffy photographs. they are truly spectacular.

I just hope my piccys of Saturn's spongy moon Hyperion are real and not just some deep sea sponge !

New optics produce ultrasharp images of sunspot

NATIONAL SOLAR OBSERVATORY NEWS RELEASE
Posted: October 5, 2005

Advanced technologies now available at the National Science
Foundation's Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, New Mexico, are
revealing striking details inside sunspots and hint at features
remaining to be discovered in solar activity.





High-resolution image of sunspot produced with the new
camera attached to the Dunn's adaptive optics system. Credit:
Friedrich Woeger, KIS, and Chris Berst and Mark Komsa, NSO/AURA/NSF

This image, spanning an area more than three times wider than Earth,
was made possible by the Dunn's recently completed AO76 advanced
adaptive optics image correction system and a new high-resolution
CCD camera.

This ultrasharp image of sunspot AR 10805 shows several objects of
current scientific interest. G-band bright points, which indicate
the presence of small-scale magnetic flux tubes, are seen near the
sunspot and between several granules (columns of hot gas circulating
upward).


source:spaceflightnow.com

Science taps into ocean secrets

Some 13,000 new marine species have been discovered in the past year, according to information released by an international alliance of scientists.

The Census of Marine Life (COML) has also uncovered previously unknown migration routes used by fish such as tuna and shark.

The $1bn 10-year project, which is building a huge database, involves researchers in more than 70 countries.

The new knowledge will inform future conservation and fisheries policies.


In some of the results we've had you can see a kind of doughnut of circulation which seems to concentrate life in deep water

Dr Fred Grassle of Rutgers University says

"We know something about the first 100m at this point but we know almost nothing about what lies down in the deep.

"Our analysis shows that if you catch a fish below 2,000m it is 50 times more likely to be new to science," he told the BBC News website



This goby fish from Guam lives in tandem with a shrimp; the shrimp digs a
burrow and the fish acts as sentinel.



About 90% of the ocean biomass is microbia



SOURCE BBC

More than 80,000 specimens were collected during an expedition to the mid-Atlantic ridge



Some bizarre creatures lurk in the very deep


The census is shedding more light on zooplankton

how frustrating !!! it wouldn't let me post all the piccys above in the one post !!...i don't have the power...seems i need to eat more spinach !!

I'm sure that you know this, but it is worth mentioning. People need to remember that on web pages, including forum pages, graphics take the most time to load. With a dialup connection, some graphics may take a very long time to load, and in many cases, they will load sequentially, one after the other, so if there are several on a page, it can take a good long time for the page to finish loading. Most computer users have a very limited attention span, so there are many people who will click off of a page rather than waiting for the graphics to finish showing up.

All of this is a round about way of sayinig that perhaps it is a good thing that you can only attach just so many images. It is one reason I usually furnish links rather than posting the entire graphic. And in case anyone wonders what difference it would make on a forum if all the pictures were included on one post or on several, with slow connections, more likely than not, the posts themselves will be sequential, so there is something to look at and read while the other graphics are loading. This makes it SEEM like it is loading faster, though in actuality, it isn't, so the user is more likely going to stay on the page.

Interesting critters, incidentally. And they believe that we still haven't found even half of the species of plants and animals that live in the sea. THAT is awesome!