Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Not an April Fool’s Day joke
NASA’s Cassini has imaged a hexagonal structure centered over Saturn’s North Pole:
The feature was noticed over twenty years ago by Voyager 1 and 2, so it’s not an ephemeral finding. From the NASA site,
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”
It’s not a small structure, either — nearly four Earths could fit inside it. (The Earth’s diameter is nearly 8000 miles, and this thing is 15,000 miles across. Four Earths would rub shoulders and spill over the confines of the hex. But, still!)
By contrast, at Saturn’s South Pole, they’ve found a “hurricane with a giant eye.”
There’s even a video (scroll down a bit).
Cool!
D.
That’s neat, in a bizarre way.
a hexagonal structure centered over Satan’s North Pole
That’s what I read; really! Oh, my. I have the Blog Against Theocracy
on the brain.
I thought, okay, If BlueGal
sent him over, it’s got to be humor. What, another Santa/Satan thing??
Seems the Joke’s on me!!
Thanks for stopping by. The encouragement is definitely appreciated. I’ll add you to my links too, as soon as I update the page again.
Oh, great. Now all the Cydonia Face-on-Mars whackos will have a new planet to obsess about.
http://www.mt.net/~watcher/mars.html
Yeah, Pat, I thought it was cool, too. How do you get a hexagon from atmospheric effects?
I haven’t forgotten your WiP, btw. I decided I would rather suffer by staring at my monitor for four hours, managing an average of 100 words per hour. No, I don’t think it was a wise decision, either.
Welcome, Thorne. Hang around here long enough and I’ll rub off on ya like an applicator tattoo.
Dean, I’m half tempted to look at some astrology websites to see ’em go nuts over this. But only half tempted.
It’s the impression left by the very large Allen key used to wind the system up* 7000 years ago by the creating deity.
The ones on Earth and Mars are *obviously* hidden by the polar ice caps.
Best answer yet 🙂
applicator tattoo.???
Thought that would raise an eyebrow or two 🙂
Okay, Balls…
😉 What’s the scoop? I even googled it. Henna was the closest thing I could find. I spoze that could rub off. Now, my kinda ink is another story all together. Keep comin’ ’round my blog… It hurts, but I’ll make you like it!!
OT I’d like to do a “read more” html cut on my blog entries, but have no idea how to do it. Can you advise??
Thorne, I’m Walnut! My wife is Balls 🙂
I’m not a particularly savvy HTML/CSS wonk. WordPress makes the “read more” thing easy, but on other interfaces (like Blogspot) it’s nearly impossible to do the “read more” thing. Sorry!
LOL Walnut, Good for her!!! (I guess we know who wears the panties in this family!!!) Thanx anyway on the “read more”.