To celebrate the upcoming release of our new Cassini HD iPad app, I will be posting my favorite images from it all week. These natural color images capture Saturn’s rings with such graphic beauty and stark drama, they’re easily among my favorites.

Cassini HD will be released in the iTunes store on Saturday, Sept. 15. Take advantage of our special release offer and get it for free that first day only. 

I’m very excited to announce that we have a release date for our new app Cassini HD. It will be available in the iTunes App Store this Saturday (Sept. 15) and it will be totally FREE for the whole first day (after Saturday it will be the regular price of $1.99). 

About the app:

While handheld and mobile devices have the power to put information at our fingertips, they can also transform how we learn and interact with knowledge. Cassini HD, the first iPad app from Thinx, harnesses that power to take audiences on a voyage of discovery to the ringed planet of Saturn. The app’s intuitive design helps users to easily navigate a collection of more than 840 spectacular images returned to Earth by the Cassini orbiter while showcasing those images in a way that is both elegant and informative.

Features:

• Journey from Saturn itself, to its stunning rings and past more than 20 different moons 
• Supports both portrait and landscape orientation for optimal viewing quality. 
• Full captions expand with additional information with just a tap 
• Alphabetical menu brings you directly to any section of interest; unique navigation map allows you to scroll easily through this vast collection 
• Integration with the most popular social networks: Share your discoveries with friends on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, or via email 
• Save your favorite images to your photo roll and use them as a wallpaper on your iPad 
• Future updates will add to this collection the latest images from Cassini as more become available.

This week is my blogiversary. August 23 of last year I put up my first posts on Tumblr not knowing what to expect. Fast forward to one year later, and I’ve met lots of new people who have made this a fun and interesting place to share and exchange all kinds of interesting art and ideas.

It’s such a great community that I wanted to give something back as a sort of anniversary gift, so I tried to come up with something appropriate. After seeing yet another spectacular photo from Cassini travel across my dashboard while thinking “I wish I could put them all in one giant gallery”, I realized that I had my plan. 

With my husband Joe, my app design partner, we got to work on what was going to be a simple ebook of the NASA Cassini Mission’s best photos. As time went on, I found the images so inspiring that the project grew, and it became a full fledged app with over 840 images, interactive menus, expandable captions and, best of all, the ability to share the images on Tumblr (and other popular sites) through a social media sharing tool.

I wanted to announce that it was available for download on my anniversary, but instead all I can do is let you know its coming VERY soon and there will be an opportunity for you to get it for free. So stay tuned and thanks for an awesome year!

You can find out more about it here. You can also join our mailing list for future announcements.

I am a big fan of the minimalist black and white images that have been coming back from NASA’s Cassini Orbiter, but I think the ultraviolet-light images are pretty cool too. 

Cassini has been getting some really amazing minimalist shots of Saturn’s moons. Here are a few of the most recent raw images.

Beautiful photos of Saturn’s moon Enceladus from National Geographic’s photo gallery.

The surreal collages of Kevin Buist

The detail of these raw, unprocessed images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus are amazing. They were taken on September 13, 2011 and received on Earth September 15, 2011.