Saturn's aurora, even better than before
The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait. It turns out that the video covers an amazing 81 hours of auroral action on Saturn's night side. This version of the video has also been annotated with lines denoting Saturn's limb and latitudes 70 and 78 degrees north latitude. The auroral action occurs at a ....

Two more awesome pictures from the Enceladus flyby
I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby. This first one I put together from two of the south polar plume images – you can see all four of the tiger stripes, and the plumes issuing from them, in this wide shot. I mosaicked two images, matching their levels, rotated them 180 degrees to put "ground" at the bottom and "sky" at the top, and filled in a little of the background in the ....

Another great Enceladus shot
Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape. By the way, if you checked the Cassini raw images website earlier in the day, you should return, because there are more photos from the Enceladus flyby as well as numerous high-resolution shots on Rhea, apparently color frames captured with high sun. I don't yet know their geometry -- I wonder if they'll reveal more of the relatively blue spots ....

Prepare for your jaw to hit the floor when you see these pictures of Enceladus
Wow, just wow. I didn't know what to expect from the second flyby of Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus in November, which happened yesterday. I knew the cameras were given control of spacecraft pointing during the closest part of the flyby, so that there should be some pretty cool photos of tiger stripes, but I have to confess I didn't expect anything tremendously different from the first high-res imaging flyby. Well, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, ....

Encouraging motion on Spirit
It really looks like the second attempt at driving Spirit out of the trap has had the hoped-for result: some forward progress (maybe about a centimeter), and no evidence for further downward sinking. The best views seem to be from the right-eye Hazard Avoidance Cameras, the belly-mounted fish-eye cameras that the rover uses to get a look at her own wheels. I'm going to give my preliminary analysis here -- I'll edit this post later with an ....