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03-010 "Traffic Jam"
2003, digital

Inside Saturn's rings, the delicate perfection of the system seen from afar is transformed into seeming chaos: billions of slowly tumbling icy bodies, rather like the asteroid belts of science fiction movies. This tumult is fairly tame by Saturn's standards, actually; the densest parts of the ring system are much more crowded, and this scene is near one of the gaps where the swarm thins out. The size of the objects in the ring apparently vary by region, and tend to sort themselves out; here, the particles are the size of automobiles. In other areas, the population is composed of much smaller bodies the size of sand or even smaller. In the background, we can see millions more moonlets in the rings, and mighty Saturn behind them. The dark band across Saturn is the shadow of the ring system falling across the planet.

An interesting note about the technique used for this image: sculpture may sound like a primitive tool in the computer age, but electronic versions of lumpy and battered objects are often disappointing. The artist used these for the more distant ring moonlets, but created some very low-tech rocks out of modeling clay, using rounded utensils to push in craters after creating realistic lumpy shapes. These were imaged using a digital camera, rotating them to different angles so that one rock could be used many times. Inserted into the digital background, these clay creations add realism that computers still have trouble reproducing.

Chris Butler