March 28, 2007: Hexagon on Saturn
 

http://cellar.org/2007/saturnhex.jpg

Many sites are highlighting this today, and it's been a long time since we've had a space image.

The explanation at space.com is pretty good:
How big is it? (Hey, that's a personal question)
As for me, I'm more concerned about the sideways skull that appears at the bottom of the image, near the middle.

I don't know what it is but I'm sure we'll find a way to blow it up or exploit it's natural resources.

Argh! Wish I hadn't read that bit - it's a whole swirl of skulls to me now.

Last time I saw swirling skulls like that was after I'd sampled some interesting fungi :rainfro:

I know a lot of interesting fun guys.

Very cool, thanks for the link.

I don't see the skull...

It's spinning very quickly.
No word on the skulls, though.

Hand me a crescent wrench.

The skull I see is a cartoonish sort of skull making an "ooooo" sort of face; it's also a bit monkey-like. It's at about the 225 of a compass.

This is the skull I see. Alien skull.:alien:

So thats where they moved the Thunderdome to !!!

Oh and I see skulls , and distorted faces ALL around the Hex ,
Could this be the tourtured soals that perrished in the Feared ThunderDome ????

What do you call a mushroom that takes you out and feeds you drinks?...... A fungi to be with.

*shivers* Some of those skulls remind me of Munch's "The Scream".

Crescent wrench! No, you need a 25,000,000,000-mm 6-point socket, with at least a 3/4 inch drive and a really long handle.

Give me a wrench long enough and a lugnut on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Didn't anyone see 2010? That's a big STOP sign...someone doesn't want us exploring any further out.

There's got to be a Jesus or a Virgin Mary in there somewhere.

No Steve, that skull IS a Jesus.

Muahahaha!!

Hold my beer.

I wonder what the Velikovsky-ites are making of it.

What, it's metric? Aw, I hate working on these foreign models.

My theory is that it is not a hexagon but instead a static sine wave of 6 wave lengths. We see it as a hexagon because it is mapped on a circle. I created this image using the polar coordinates filter in photoshop Attachment 12224

Nice! I agree.

Slight that is an awesome explanation, thanks!

But what about the skulls?

Well, this was an interesting conversation, until Slight got all serious and fucked it up...

(Seriously...that's awesome...I never would have thought of that. Of course, I hated trig.)

Wait, Photoshop has a polar coordinates filter? What's next? Path integrals?

A skull filter.

So what causes a 60 mile high sine wave around the pole? Does it extend to, or close to, the surface? Is the cloud mass greater, closer to the pole, causing a sine wave where the boundary lies?

That's the trouble with space, or science in general, every time you come up with a good answer, it just creates more questions.

It's not a sine wave. It's the result of the viscous fluid (the atmosphere) lagging behind the spinning container (the planet)*. The shape is a ... mathematical coincidence. Rather, our perception of some meaningful pattern is the coincidence. The shape is just the math and physics.



* Or just lagging compared to the parts of the atmosphere that are spinning at different rates. Similar phenomena have been observed in the eyes of terrestrial hurricanes. I provided a good link above.



edit: No, I haven't recently returned from a vacation on Saturn, Uranus (or anyone else's for that matter... ha ha)

But a sine wave is nothing but a shape too, really... it doesn't imply a specific medium or source or anything like that.

Alien metal concert.

love the skulls!

I was thinking about this, and you know, it's not surprising... the bulk of the best things that Photoshop can do is just really hard math! All the filters are math in disguise.

Is that why it's so big? I have 4 and 5 and 5.5 and gave 'em up for elements, because I'm to dumb to use all the stuff in the full size versions. Hell, I've been using elements for a couple years and just discovered it has talk bubbles. Duh

APoD finally got around to it. probably influenced by the cellar

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070403.html

The movie clip shows the inside and out side of the hex rotating at the same relative speed.

I think it's a polar jet stream. The earth's northern hemisphere jet stream often falls into stable 4-wave and 5-wave patterns lasting several weeks, 4-wave most common in summer and 5-wave in winter. My meteorology professor said that six and seven wave patterns happened but were very unstable. I guess a six wave pattern on Saturn is very stable.

Does the Earth's northern hemisphere jet stream also have skulls in it? Like around Iceland?

Yes, although some are being used.

great pics.

Fascinating. The sciencey stuff kind of lost me....I never could get my head around trig. I mean....doing some of the equations with a log book as per high school exercises I could just about manage, but I could never visualise what it was I was doing. I just followed the formula I'd been given. It was, and is, meaningless to me as applied to the real world.

Aheh.

I saw this Science article on /. that shows how to recreate this 6 wave pattern in the lab. I found this quote from the article quite telling about the fact that other people like @juggle5 have seen this stuff before: