Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Saturn from above

Saturn from above

Original - The rings of Saturn (as imaged here by Cassini in 2007) are the most conspicuous in the Solar System.

Reason: Nominated at PPR (see here - dragged from there as I was archiving some). The original nominator (Sagittarian Milky Way) stated: "The picture reminds me of that image of Coruscant I like, showing (apparently contradictory) day and night sides at the same time. It has some nice touches like the way the ring shadow falls on the planet and how the only clearly lit part of the globe is the twilight band."
Articles this image appears in: Saturn
Cassini–Huygens timeline
Creator: NASA

Neutral as nominator. I prefer the recently promoted , though this offers a different perspective from 'above', which gives a better, high-res view of the rings. Let's see what others think. jjron (talk) 08:10, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - the other image is at a more pleasing angle, on this one the entire side of the planet is blown, and the edge of it is aliased - bad editing, photographs don't alias themselves. There's also a nasty reflection just on the right of the pole, stitching errors in many places. A technical question - surely it's not possible to see more than one hemisphere in front of Saturn's rings... so why has this been edited to stick the planet in front of the rings? —Vanderdecken∴ ∫ξ φ 11:42, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- I assume you're talking about the part at the 'bottom' where the white part of Saturn appears to be above the rings. If you're asking me, I have no idea, as I said I just pulled it off PPR while archiving, and put it here as the nominator seemed very keen on it. It may have something to do with the way the mosaic was built; from the image description "The view is a mosaic of 36 images...taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system." --jjron (talk) 10:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - The inner ring is almost transparent, you can see this in other Saturn photos. I don't know about the aliasing, NASA did it not me. Maybe these were the unprocessed raw pixels from the CCD chip? It can always be fixed. Explanation of the image: This is the dark side of the rings, (the ring shadow on Saturn's higher than center and you can see the rings act as an co illuminator/lightchoke on the extreme lower right. The rings are planes very thickly (but not impenetrably) populated with tiny rocks, and the sun is shining at such a slight angle (on the other side) that we're seeing side-scattering of whatever light manages to get out alive. Hence the long exposure. The bluish twilight is possibly the real color of the upper atmosphere or latitude zones of weirdly twilit clouds or something. There's also [1] and if no one really likes this one. Vanderdecken, which part is the reflection you're talking about? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:32, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - There's a rhombic reflection centred on (2083,946). —Vanderdecken∴ ∫ξ φ 18:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      - I thought it'd be that. (It doesn't seem too bothersome until one looks at the LCD from above..) That's obviously a frame that was exposed too long and wasn't fixed. It should get darker as one goes from night lower right to night upper left. I'll upload an edited one within 24 hours. Would anyone like the rings to be slighly brightened too for aesthetic purposes?, that would be a falsification of what came out of the NASA camera.
Oppose The one of Saturn that was just made an FP was much better. --Shark face 217 01:53, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted MER-C 02:26, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]