Saturn by night

Taken last July by cameras on board the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. From the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day site. The link for this image is here. The blurb explains:

In contrast to the human-made lights that cause the nighttime side of Earth to glow faintly, Saturn’s faint nighttime glow is primarily caused by sunlight reflecting off of its own majestic rings. The … image was taken when the Sun was far in front of the spacecraft. From this vantage point, the northern hemisphere of nighttime Saturn, visible on the left, appears eerily dark. Sunlit rings are visible ahead, but are abruptly cut off by Saturn’s shadow. In Saturn’s southern hemisphere, visible on the right, the dim reflected glow from the sunlit rings is most apparent. Imprinted on this diffuse glow, though, are thin black stripes not discernable to any Earth telescope — the silhouetted C ring of Saturn. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 and its mission is scheduled to continue until 2008.

Here’s a funny thing…

GMSV reports that

Asked to testify Sept. 28 before the investigative subcommittee of House Energy and Commerce are Board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn; HP legal counsel Ann Baskins; Larry Sonsini, a prominent Silicon Valley lawyer who is HP’s external lawyer, and Ronald R. DeLia, a Needham, Mass., private investigator and operator of Security Outsourcing Solutions….

Note the name Sonsini. Larry W. Sonsini is a senior member of the prominent Silicon Valley legal firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. But, curiously, the firm’s Web site makes no mention of their Chairman’s exciting forthcoming appearance before Congress.

Later… I’ve just come on Dan Gillmor’s view:

If I was running either the Chronicle or the Merc, I would be assigning my best investigative folks to look deeply into Sonsini and his law firm. The story has been done, but never in the depth I suspect it deserves….

Dan has covered the Valley for years and is one of its shrewdest observers.

More on Sonsini here.

50 years’ hard

Something I’d forgotten — the hard drive had its 50th birthday the other day. IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC computer (shown here) on September 13th, 1956. It was the first computer to include a disk drive — named the IBM 350 Disk File. The file system consisted of a stack of fifty 24″ spinning discs with a total storage capacity of about 4.4 MB. IBM leased it to customers for $35,000 a year. How times change.