Thought I'd share this actual photograph of Saturn back-lit by the sun. It was taken by the NASA satellite Cassini.
Here's a link to the Cassini image database and a great NYtimes article.
My favorite cut from the Times article is where they describe guiding the satellite using gravity assistance from the planet:
"A better analogy, he said, is two ice skaters in a hockey rink: a little girl and her father. The little girl is Cassini, small and fast; Dad is slow but strong. When the little girl reaches Dad at the red line, they clasp hands and Dad rotates. He can fling his daughter farther down the ice toward the far goal, toss her at right angles into the boards, send her back where she came from or let her go off at an angle."
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ReplyDeleteI like the photos of saturn.
ReplyDeleteBy chance have you ever read anything that includes Nazis? I find they are interesting in a sci-fi context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Nazis
Currently there is a new film in production about this as well.
http://www.ironsky.net/
Please keep up the great blog.
Glad you like the pics! The connection between SF and Nazis is not a tenuous one as the Nazis were a driving force behind huge WWII technological leaps, notably (though not exclusively) the Jet Engine and Submarines. There were also plenty of speculations about fantastical Nazi weapons, like the Nazi Bell. Also, a number of Nazi Scientists were smuggled into the US after the end of the war, melding them into the science community in the US.
ReplyDeleteCheck out Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream": "The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. This is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate history version of Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University." (From WikiP)
You just tickled the tackle when you said "alternate history version of Adolf Hitler". I'm seeing if my local myopic has this.
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