
Stunning images indeed, Mr Ugarkovic
Have one of these -->
An amateur image processor has stitched together raw images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft to produce a stunning image of Saturn, seen from above on 10 October. Gordan Ugarkovic's view of Saturn Gordan Ugarkovic constructed the view from "12 image footprints with red, blue and green filters from Cassini's imaging science …
"my thoughts too, those cloud rings just look like bad quantization artefacts on the shading of a smooth sphere"
Well, you should have done it properly yourself then. The guy does something that is pretty original with public domain data, comes up with something that nobody else has done to an adequate standard, and you carp on about the fact that the quality could be better.
So go on then, you do something that makes the rest of us go "Wow!"
"It's amazing how computer-rendered reality can look sometimes."
Having spent most of my career producing computer-rendered reality, I can tell you that if it looks real, it is, even if its not. Which is to say that on the occasions I have had to reproduce images of Saturn like this, most people don't know what it looks like in any detail to question it. So you can get away with murder. But if course, I have no reason to doubt these images, even if I have no idea what Saturn looks like up close.
Magnetic North is an arbitrary, Anglocentric indicator of 'up'. The Chinese traditionally used South as their primary direction and Joaquín Torres García has a fabulous painting illustrating the fact that the European/US concept of 'up' is a fallacy and is symptomatic of their inflated views of themselves on the global stage. Applying such Anglocentic thinking to other planets may anger their inhabitants and isn't a good way to start serious exploration of space :)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joaqu%C3%ADn_Torres_Garc%C3%ADa_-_América_Invertida.jpg
The Orient is a state of mind: It's wherever you want it to be. That's why the official name of Uruguay is the Oriental Republic of Uruguay.
The painting is a disconcerting thing for people though, especially for such a simply drawn thing. I have a copy of the painting in the lobby at our office and it's pretty amazing people can't understand what they're looking at. The idea of 'North' as up is so ingrained in people's minds they can't picture it any other way.
The idea of defining 'up' on sphere is pretty silly to begin with, but no sillier than people who don't understand a compass, by default, must point at least two directions. Judging by the downvotes I got earlier several people here can't see the humor in all that. That just makes it funnier though :)
Looking at the blue spot (difficult to see ) on the pole, it seems that mother nature needs a graphics card upgrade. All joking aside it is cool to see a hexagon on a planet. Looking closer there is even a border around it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/badastronomy/10328043663/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Also this image gets me quite excited about astronomy:
For those who don't know (like me) the hexagon on Saturn explained: http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/04/saturns-strange-hexagon-recreated-lab