Yesterday, NASA released a real treat for all the space photography lovers out there: a gorgeous, incredibly detailed photo mosaic of Saturn that also captured Venus, Mars and Earth (with everybody on Earth waving at the camera at that exact moment... not that you can see any them).
The NASA spacecraft Cassini has sent back some incredible imagery of the planet Saturn over the years, much of which is being put to use to create an IMAX movie. But thanks to the work of a Croatian software developer, we now have a full, breath-taking, high-resolution photo mosaic of Saturn in all its glory as it looked on October 10th.
On July 19th, the Cassini spacecraft that has been hovering around Saturn -- and sending back some stunning images we might add -- turned around to take a picture of its home planet as part of a larger mosaic of the Saturn system.
In honor of this occasion, NASA asked people to send in photos of them waving at Cassini as it took their picture from roughly 808 Million miles away (give or take). Over 1,400 photos were submitted, and have been combined into a beautiful collage of Earth.
Were you smiling a lot Friday afternoon? Hope so, because that's when you and your 7 billion planetary neighbors got a rare portrait session from the Cassini spacecraft. Orbiting above Saturn almost a billion miles away, the craft turned its camera towards to Earth to capture some spectacular images of our planet foregrounded by Saturn's rings.
It was the first time in nine years that Cassini has been in orbit and taking scheduled photos of our planet, prompting NASA and friends to promote a "The Day That the Earth Smiled" event via social media.
The tagline for the 2014 IMAX movie In Saturn's Rings simply states: "This is Real." And it's a tagline that bears repeating to yourself over and over again as you watch the preview footage above.
A fly-through put together from over one million real photographs -- many taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft -- the movie promises to contain zero CGI. And above, we have the first teaser for the film, available in 4K as long as your monitor can handle it.
Last month we shared some photo illustrations by science artist Ron Miller that showed what the night sky would look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the moon. Now Miller is back again with an equally interesting concept: what would landscape photos look like if Earth had a ring like Saturn's?
Photographs of storm systems as seen from airplanes or satellites aren't too uncommon these days, but have you ever seen one that looks like this? Probably not, because this photograph is out of this world -- literally. It's titled "The Rose," and shows the spinning vortex of a gigantic hurricane on the surface of Saturn.
If you've ever watched the evening news on television, you've probably seen photos and video captured by the powerful cameras on the station's helicopter. Here's something interesting: on a clear night, the long reach of the helicopter's camera can actually snap a clear photograph of the planet Saturn!
The photograph above was captured by Chopper 6, the news helicopter operated by Philadelphia's 6ABC Action News.
YouTube user Roy Prol created this fascinating animation that imagines what Earth would …
Designer Chris Abbas took a large number of black and white photographs captured …
You probably won’t believe this, but this fly-by video of Saturn wasn’t created with 3D computer graphics. Instead, it …