Tuesday, May 09, 2006

The Descent of Huygens Onto Titan


This is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in my life.

UPDATE: Click the text, please...not the image. It's just a screen capture.

(Quicktime required.)

5 comments:

ntodd said...

Cooooool.

Anonymous said...

One of the coolest things I have seen in a long, long time.

Phila said...

Speechless,

Is Huygens a probe, and Titan one of Jupiter's moons?

Yep. Here's a page that explains the sounds.

Anonymous said...

Amazing footage. The sound is just lovely. I recently bought a Meade telescope and recommend the pursuit. I look at Jupiter and its charming moons and I can look at Saturn and see the rings through a dirty window and dirty atmosphere! I can't wait to get it out in better conditions. It's a real treat spying on 'the wanderers'. In the 1970’s when people could study Jupiter’s moon Io more closely we learned that the earth was not unique, not alone - Io is also geologically active, just like the earth.

Phila said...

Huygens. Dutch name? I've always liked trying to read dutch, and elide those "uyg" combinations.

Yeah. He did some important early work on light, and timekeeping. And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting...optics, maybe?

The strange music didn't reach my terrestrial heart however. C'est la vie!

I love it, personally. But then, I was listening obsessively to shortwave static when a lot of my school chums were "getting down" to the Steve Miller Band. It's one of the things that made me so popular as a lad.