It’s been almost two weeks since the Cassini probe pulled off its orbital two-step through the rings of Saturn.

The astronomy community exuberantly viewed initial photos beamed to mother ship Earth across more than two billion miles of our solar system. Cries of “compelling,” “unexpected,” “outstanding” greeted each download. Then, sotto voce, the already familiar refrain: “They raise more questions than answers,” about Saturn, its rings, and the tantalizingly mysterious moon Titan.

Scientists never expected signs of life. They do hope to find organic chemicals that might serve as the building blocks of life.

My first reactions to the pictures, on the other hand, were not the ones I had expected, not even close. I guess my frame of reference was tied to the first photos from the Hubble Telescope that amazed both me and the world. These are not Hubble photos, yet, anyway.

The “Hubble effect” had me looking long and hard off into a galactic wonderland, glimpses of miracles in starlight.

The Cassini “effect” has me thumbing through my trusty astrophysic’s text, bonding with the electromagnetic spectrum, as I force myself to think in long and short-wavelengths, high and low-frequencies so that I get a better sense of how, and therefore what, Cassini has begun to tell us.

Besides the visible spectrum, Cassini “sees” in ultraviolet and infrared. Its images reflect and interpret Saturn in ways our senses could only imagine. (Trust me, it will be primarily interpretations, not facts, that result from the Cassini. Already, what’s been recorded is too novel for previous predictions and hypothoses to stand up.)

Specifically, pictures coming back from Cassini in the infrared (which allows for “looking through dense cloud cover”) and ultraviolet, (which allows for seeing minute, “invisible” properties of an object) spectrum forced me into considering the role radiation plays in communicating information.

Cassini’s pictures, taken with the most elaborate and sophisticated instrumentation ever sent aloft, humbled me when I thought how little the information that streams along the visible spectrum actually is when compared to the full electromagentic spectrum, and how much more there is to learn outside what I can see with my own eyes. (The infrared and ultraviolet bracket the narrow visible spectrum with which we actually see. There are also xrays, gamma rays, and radio waves.)

Cassini can "see" in wavelengths of light and energy that the human eye cannot. The instruments on the spacecraft can "feel" things about “magnetic fields and tiny dust particles that no human hand could detect.”

The remote sensing instruments can calculate measurements from a great distance. This set includes both optical and microwave sensing instruments including cameras, spectrometers, radar and radio.

The Nasa/JPL site offers the following description of Cassini’s sensors:

In many ways, the spacecraft's instruments can be classified to the way human senses operate. Your eyes and ears are "remote sensing" devices because you can receive information from remote objects without being in direct contact with them. Your senses of touch and taste are "direct sensing" devices. Your nose can be construed as either a remote or direct sensing device. You can certainly smell the apple pie across the room without having your nose in direct contact with it, but the molecules carrying the scent do have to make direct contact with your sinuses. Cassini's instruments can be classified as remote and microwave remote sensing instruments, and fields and particles instruments. These are all designed to record significant data and take a variety of close-up measurements.

Yes, I know there is much to learn about Saturn, and the almost daily surprises confronting NASA and JPL astronomers, especially from its moon Titan, that bigger than Mercury object whirling about Saturn in our solar system.

But first and foremost, thanks to pictures taken at wavelengths that only a bat or insect could see, there is a much richer way of perceiving the world around us. We can delight in the expectation that distant planetary mysteries, and proximate phenomena here on earth, will open up before our very “eyes.”