Here’s a beautiful color portrait of Saturn taken by Cassini during the planet’s 2009 spring equinox last August. Approximately every fifteen years Saturn is angled so that the light from the sun strikes it straight-on, causing the shadows cast by the rings to appear as a pencil-thin line along its equator. The Cassini spacecraft happened…
Month: August 2010
Blast from the Past
This photo of Neptune’s largest moon Triton was taken by Voyager 2 on August 24, 1989…nearly 21 years ago! With a resolution of about six miles per pixel it reveals the rugged mountainous terrain of this frozen moon in the far reaches of our solar system, including its signature “cantaloupe terrain” seen here in the…
A Cassini Composition
Cassini took this beautiful image of a crescent-lit Enceladus shadowed against Saturn’s silhouette during Friday’s flyby, demonstrating once again its uncanny ability to capture wonderfully-composed shots that illustrate the inherent beauty of our family of planets. Enceladus is the now-famous moon with “jet-power”…continually erupting geysers spray water ice out into space from long “tiger stripe”…
Auroral Arrhythmia
Just like Earth, Saturn has its own versions of northern (and southern) lights illuminating high-altitude rings around its polar latitudes. Understandably much larger and more powerful than our planet’s auroras, they are nevertheless caused by the same thing: energetic particles streaming out from the sun get caught in Saturn’s magnetic field and are funneled toward…
Moon Quartet
Four of Saturn’s 62 moons are seen passing each other in this animation, composed from 22 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 27, 2010. Epimetheus, Prometheus, Janus and tiny Atlas all orbit Saturn within or near the ring system. As the animation begins, the potato-shaped Prometheus is just “rounding the bend” inside…
Lights in the Dark 