Cassini takes some shots of Hyperion…

And they’re strangely beautiful.

I’m amazed at the fact that they shoot these probes out there with one megapixel cameras and almost ten years later they send back such good quality shots. A physics major friend of mine explained to me that the vacuum of space affords much sharper shots because lack of interference by pesky things like atmospheres. That, and NASA’s site says that these images are filtered and processed in order to recompose the images from the transmitted data.

Knowing what I know about satellite communication, I can’t imagine how long it takes to transmit this stuff forward and back. Yikes.