Rev-135 July 15 - August 4 is up. First full revolution of the Cassini Solstice Mission.

"determine if [Kiviuq] might be a binary object"??? is this standard operating procedure for the outer moons, or is there particular reason to believe Kiviuq might be binary? Is there any moon of any planet that has ever been observed to be binary??

Hmm! Good catch, Emily. I wonder if they're thinking it might be a contact binary like many asteroids are thought to be.

Yes, I also thought that was interestig when I read it. Maybe the hint was from a strange light curve. Kiviuq was imaged multiple times on rev 121 Nov 2009 and probably other times as well.

No it is just a standard thing to check with these outer satellite light curves. Nothing special that I am aware of with Kiviuq, though I am not always told these things. I just know that it something that is being looked for (at least it is noted in the notes for these observations), and of course I mention it in order to hopefully make it come true, since the discovery of a binary moon was one of my predictions for this decade I'd like to see ONE of them come true, at least.

Oh one other thing, this is not going to be a normal thing for these articles to come out this early before the start of the orbit. I will be traveling next week when I normally would have written up the Rev135 article, so I wrote it yesterday instead (and it was edited by Joe this morning). The article for the very busy Rev136 will likely come out at the normal time, the day before the start of the orbit.

This is interesting. Tidal disruption of binary asteroids at capture is the most credible way to create irregular satellites of the outer planets (see for example http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/...ature04792.html )
so finding a binary irregular satellite would put the whole theory in doubt!

Well, don't forget there is always the chance of post-capture disruption...

And the existence of asteroids with more than one moon.

There's a very nice cloudtop sequence from here to here that's just begging for some ugordan magic!!
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Can't wait to see this in colour!!

There's also some very nice moon shadows in some of them.
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That's spectacular, Astro0! Unfortunately, without flatfields and better S/N than these raws the color frames don't bring much to the table. There's a bit of cloud relief near the terminator otherwise not visible in (smeared?) long exposure MT3 frames:
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I'd wait for calibrated images, though

While I'm at it, another kodak moment:
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Tethys transiting with Titan on the far side.

That's already stunning gordan!

ugordan: "...the color frames don't bring much to the table"

Yes, they do............MY JAW!!!!

Amazing ugordan. Beautiful....let's call that one "The Signature of Saturn"

Come here, ugordan - no, seriously. Come here...

< slap slap slap >

Are you kidding?!?! I just got back from work, literally ten minutes ago, ready to punch my way through a wall, Hulk-style, then I go online and see that... a sublimely beautiful colour picture, showing vertical relief in the enormous clouds of the most beautiful planet in the solar system...

It 'doesn't bring much to the table'? Oh, it does, it does. That's something very special, I think.

BTW, to give you an idea of what that cloud train would look like without contrast enhancement and in natural-ish colors, it's visible in this composite posted several posts above. The higher phase shots quickly lose contrast so it's not as noticeable there.

Last images to come down and hit the Cassini site were from July 18th. According to Cassini Significant Events 07/14/10-07/20/10, Cassini had a SSPS trip:
"The DSN track today over Canberra, Australia, started with a Solid State Power Switch (SSPS) trip alarm. Upon investigation, the switch was identified as the one that powers CDS Engineering Unit B (EU-B ). The SSPS trip response algorithm responded by first switching the SSPS OFF, then ON, and the load current has been nominal since then. This is the 32nd in-flight Cassini SSPS trip, about 7 days and 20 hours since the previous trip on the switch that powers the Fields and Particles Pallet backup heater, not breaking the frequency record of 6 days and ~11 hours set by two trips back in February 2000. Commanding will be performed to set and reload the contents of EU-B next week."
From the Rev 135 preview, there should be lots of images coming down from the last few days. Guess we will find out whats up when they post the 07/21/10-07/28/10 Significant Events or images.

The images have come down just fine. I'll need to check on the absolute latest, but more recent images than what has shown up on the JPL raw images page have come down. My suspicion is that the raw images page choked on processing more than 2000 images from the lightning search observation last week.

Thanks VP. Drinking from a fire hydrant is always dangerous.

that can slow down any server to a crawl

It's midnight, I go check the raw images on the Cassini website, and I find this interesting image of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Janus hovering above the rings.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...1/N00159974.jpg
It's part of a series that would make a nice animation, but it's too late for me to do it, I'm going to bed.

This one is nice also:http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...1/N00159934.jpg

I hope you don't mind I've taken the liberty in doing so.

And Pandora or Atlas scooting round in the background too.....
Very nice animation.

And the Dione + Tethys (?) sequence. Not stabilised.

Its Atlas.

The icy satellite mutualevents get done in colour now. Its always appreciated when someone puts in the additional effort and uses the extra info to make colour movies etc.

I was unaware.

Its a significant amount of extra work to turn an equally spaced R-G-B-R-G-B-R-G-B.......sequence of images showing relative motion of multiple objects into a colour movie. Emily has a good tutorial showing whats involved. I'm not for an instant trying to suggest that people should do this -- I'm more than happy seeing monochrome movies, I've only ever had the skill/patience to do black and white myself -- just that I'm extra grateful when they do. I'm sorry if my previous post implies otherwise.

Yup! It was!

So I "faked" it. I created a color image of Dione and Tethys by centering on Dione, then shifting the RGB parts of Tethys together. (I used the "Screen" blend rather than loading into channels). I color balanced based one of Gordon's RGB images of Dione (same features showing). So Dione and Tethys have the relative color balance. Then I cut out the RGB images of Dione and Tethys and overlaid them onto the different frames. There is a tiny bit of rotation of Dione that gets lost in this trick.

Here is the result:

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[*Animated GIF: click to animate*]

Here is a still from the above animation. This is the image I used to create the cut out Tethys and Dione figures. This corresponds to N001549938.jpg. (A clear filtered image was used to create a HiPass filter to add details.)

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Juramike

it is still very nice

It seams to me that working with these images is more of an "art form" than anything else

Not going to describe what this pic is; you really need to be surprised by it...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12728

Wow!

Awesome!
Just great science for art's sake!

just rotate and that will be my new desktop background for a bit
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I showed this photo to my wife, and she said, "what is that - the Ass Planet?"

I'm sure that Capt. K1rk would find some excuse to investigate this further...