Okay so I'm not much of a blogger and nobody who knows me well are the least bit surprised. When things have been filtered into the piles of:"stuff where I'll use my name",
"stuff I shouldn't talk about",
"stuff I simply shouldn't do",
"easily misunderstood stuff with wildly fluctuating awesome to crazy ratios highly dependent on any readers' education and sense of humor" (I'm still considering a post about a conceptual connection between the Banach-Tarski paradox and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology but I'll probably let it slide into oblivion),
and "stuff that would take ages to write up properly",
then there isn't much left (except for multiple unpublished half-finished posts that ought to be deleted).
But sometimes there's something that really ought to exist somewhere on the internet but doesn't, not until now.
It's all about a nice image from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) --you can find the original here-- showing Io crossing Jupiter. It was taken by the Cassini orbiter at the start of the millennium and has been used as a book cover for some SF book I haven't read and whose author's name I've forgotten but anyways I can see why it was used since it's such a beautiful picture.
So nice in fact I decided to use it as my desktop background. Doing so required a slight rescaling down to 900 pixels height and adding a fairly large blackish area since it's used on a screen that is 1600x900 pixels. Because of that gray-black area I decided to flip the image horizontally so that all the cruft of desktop icons went over the black part.
It worked out really well (especially with a customized New Wave GTK theme on Gnome on Linux), have a look at the desktop background version for yourself (feel free to right-click the picture and open it in a new tab):
Now finally to the point of all this...
So there you are, floating by proxy far above Jupiter courtesy of US tax payers, stretching out, relaxing and looking down at the clouds. Your eyes are drawn to Io and you start looking for cloud shapes.
Maybe you'll find the biggest cloud shape in our solar system?
That wouldn't happen to be a reddish version of Midgardsormen would it? Lurking beneath the topmost layers of clouds? Wrapping itself several times around Jupiter in its determined chase of Io? Some kind of space serpent? Do you see its eye and the round white spot above it reminiscent of the eyespots some animals have? Do you see the teeth and the gaping maw hunting for a lunar morsel?
Are we looking at what might become a 25th century schoolyard myth? ^_^
Original photo by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL), used and remixed by Gla'funk in compliance with NASA guidelines.
