Saturn spot time lapse movie

Filed under pretty pictures, amateur image processing, Saturn, Cassini, atmospheres

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A 20-frame sequence of images obtained by Cassini in September and October 2004. The frames are in simple cylindrical projection and are centered on a big spot near latitude 45°S. The source images were taken through the CB3 filter.

A lot is going on here. It's especially interesting to see the big spot merge with two smaller spots at the same time. It appears to 'swallow' them although some very bright material gets ejected from the spot in the process. Some of the spots exhibit obvious counterclockwise motion and in some cases they oscillate and change shape. The time interval between individual frames is not uniform. Additional information here.

Copyright holder: Björn Jónsson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about September 6, 2004