CASSINI

For anyone that knows me well, it isn’t a secret that space is something I am incredibly curious of and passionate about. Both deep space natural phenomena that we study from afar, as well as human endeavors closer to home like the International Space Station, fill me with equal parts fascination and wonder.

In 2016 I saw some pictures getting circulated around the internet that were taken by a probe I had never heard of, called Cassini. Cassini’s primary mission was to orbit Saturn and its respective moons, taking thousands of photos during its thirteen year life within Saturn’s orbit, until it ultimately was drawn in by the planet’s gravity, concluding its mission.

I won’t claim to have any real understanding of the hard science that was allowed to progress because of the efforts of this mission. However, the photos sent back by the probe can be described as nothing other than breathtaking. They may seem poor in quality and clarity relative to artists renditions and even pictures taken from right here on Earth using our radio telescopes, but the profound nature of seeing an image that was taken from so close to the source, can’t be understated.

When we look through a telescope, and look at something that is incredibly far away, we’re seeing the light that left the object a long time ago. In the case of Cassini (and other probes like it) we instead went directly to the source to get information and to learn more about the universe we live in and our proverbial cosmic backyard. We still had to transmit the images back to Earth which is a process virtually identical to looking at light that was sent our way, but to have literally touched the object that we are seeing, is profound to me.

Cut to a few months after I had initially seen the Cassini photos and I stumbled upon an amazing video by Chris Abbas that stitched together many of the images provided by NASA, with an ambient Nine Inch Nails track in the background. This video blew me away and convinced me to download all 59,507 images, and really start to look through them all as opposed to just the ones that had been curated by other people.

I ended up being inspired enough by Abbas’ video as well as the images themselves, that I created my own video showcasing some of my favorite sequences of pictures. I kept the video in a 1080x1080 aspect ratio because the original pictures were all square. My goal was to maintain as much of the original image integrity as possible, so that we as viewers could see the same thing Cassini saw on its mission.

Music was an incredibly important decision as well, and was the “motive” so to speak. The song is called Infinite Horizons by the post rock band God is an Astronaut. Although both the name of the song and band aren’t exactly subtle with respect to the subject of this video, I think the music itself really is reflective of the material. The spacey and expansive feel of the song complement the deep imagery being shown and emphasize it without getting in the way.

For those more technically inclined, the process to create this was relatively straightforward. Although there were around 60,000 images to go through, these were all taken in bursts. Once they are organized chronologically (or in this case, by file name), they start to look more like frames of a video as opposed to individual pictures.

When initially organizing the images, I imported the entire library into Adobe Lightroom to visualize them better in gallery mode and to allow myself to create albums which functioned as my “clips”. Each album had it’s own string of connected images that I then exported and loaded into Adobe Premiere. Dropping each block of images into the timeline generally produced a coherent video clip, with some frames occasionally needing to be individually moved around.

In terms of color correction I left everything mostly untouched, with the exception of the frames that were overexposed which I simply gamma corrected to bring more in line with the others.

I wrote this just to provide some context about a project that I was very passionate about, and for anyone who was curious about where the images came from, my thought processes, etc. If you have not watched the video then please enjoy, and if you came here after watching it, then thank you for taking the time out to watch and read!