Amazing Saturn ring-plane crossing animation

Here's another stunner from Cassini. The animation below spans not quite three hours and shows Cassini's shifting view as it crossed Saturn's ring plane on February 4, 2007. The thumbnail version below doesn't do it justice; you really need to download the full-res version to appreciate it in all its glory, though at 3.2 MB it's a bit big for those of you who read this page over a dialup connection.

This animation comes from data newly released to NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. Cassini (like all NASA missions) is required to send quarterly batches of data to the PDS, covering all data acquired nine months to a year prior, so the January 1, 2008 release of Cassini data contains everything that it did from January 1 to March 31, 2007. Of course, Cassini images are made available to the public much more quickly through the Cassini raw images website -- you can go there to get pictures that are only hours old -- but those "raw" images are somewhat reduced in quality from the versions that the mission keeps on their computers. In particular, they've all been run through an algorithm that stretches the contrast to make the lightest-toned pixels white and the darkest ones black, which makes it MUCH easier to see what's going on in an individual image, but also, unfortunately, makes it impossible to combine the raw images and get anything like true color. The raws have also been compressed by conversion to JPEG format, which makes the images download to your computer MUCH faster (the original data occupies 2 Megs per picture, while the JPEGs usually come in at less than one percent of that), but JPEG compression introduces unsightly artifacts into the images. To get approximately true colors and the prettiest pictures out of Cassini image data, you have to be a little patient, and wait that nine to twelve months to dig the photos out of the PDS. One guy who always watches the Cassini PDS releases carefully is space enthusiast Gordan Ugarkovic, whose fine work I've posted here before, and who is responsible for the animation above.