Month: September 2017

Friday, September 15, 2017 I managed to fall asleep sometime after 9 p.m. Pacific Time Thursday evening. I awoke just before my alarm was set to go off at 2 a.m. Friday. I again felt grateful to the wise people in JPL media relations for making us go home Thursday afternoon so we didn’t have to stay “on Lab” overnight! When we left the hotel at 2:30, my colleague Stephen van Vuuren had already written his social media post to go live at 5 a.m. accompanied by a mosaic of Cassini’s final portrait of Saturn compiled by Jason Major, who has done much of the image processing for In Saturn’s Rings. The drive from our hotel in Arcadia was very smooth until we got near Flintridge. Caltrans had blocked off all three exits from the westbound 110 to the JPL area for road construction! Fortunately, we were able to get off at the next exit and double back. Thank goodness for GPS...

This is the first part of a three-part blog about the end of the Cassini mission to Saturn, and my small part as an observer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during mid-September 2017. Everyone remembers their first glimpse of Saturn through a telescope. It seems unbelievable that you could see a planet with rings—but there it is! I gazed at Saturn a few weeks ago with my new 90mm spotting scope, and I attempted to capture my first image of a planet that evening. I shot several minutes of video through the scope and then used image stacking software to make a composite of the hundred or so best frames of video. To my surprise, the image came out pretty well. The image in the video is much larger than Saturn appeared through the eyepiece. You can just make out some of Saturn’s atmospheric bands and maybe a hint of the Cassini division between the A ring and B ring…or am I...