This is wacky. I’m sitting in a meeting & surfing with some small fraction of my attention bandwidth, surfing NASA’s Cassini site, and came across this press release about Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Here’s a better photo.

As if Iapetus wasn’t weird enough before, what with having the leading hemisphere completely black and the trailing hemisphere completely white, now it also has a seam? When I was a kid I had model globes of the earth, the moon, and the night sky like that too, with a seam at the equator. Hmmm… coincidence?

Actually I have an explanation: in the Star Trek episode (original series, of course) For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, the Enterprise comes across an asteroid on a collision course (natch) with a Federation planet. The asteroid turns out to be hollow and actually a generation ship called Yonada.

Yonada, Iapetus… I think the facts speak for themselves.