This is really great…an out-of-the-box raw image from Cassini showing Enceladus jetting along inside the hazy, diffuse E-ring. The spacecraft was over 414,000 miles away from the 300-mile-wide moon when this was taken. As a bonus we get a nice scattering of background stars too! This is one of those images that would have been…
Category: Saturn
A Sphere of Ice
Here’s a wonderfully crisp portrait of Saturn’s moon Rhea, taken by Cassini on October 17, 2010 at an altitude of 24,300 miles. Illuminated on the right by sunlight, the left hemisphere is dimly lit by reflected light from Saturn. Rhea is Saturn’s second-largest moon after Titan, but at 950 miles across (compared to 3,200) Rhea is…
Color Cast
Another awesome upload by Gordan Ugarkovic, here’s a color-composite image from Cassini data taken in December 2009 showing a jetting Enceladus lit by “Saturnshine” – reflected diffused sunlight from an off-frame Saturn – and given a Saturn-y coloration at the same time! Icy Enceladus is typically a bright white color, with some grey and…
Multi Moons
I can’t even begin to say how many moons Cassini captured in this raw image, taken yesterday October 6! I see Epimetheus and Janus and Pan and Daphnis (I think) and…Atlas?….and…and……..is that Tethys at the bottom? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that this is a whole lot of moons…
A Shepherd’s Shadow
Inner shepherd of Saturn’s ropy F-ring, Prometheus casts a long shadow through the ring’s icy haze in this beautifully reworked Cassini image by Gordan Ugarkovic. Discovered by Voyager in 1980 Prometheus completes a tumbling orbit around Saturn every 14.7 hours, regularly dipping into the F-ring in a scalloped path and pulling out streamers of icy…
The Light Fantastic
Holy ice spray! This image, released today, shows a dramatic view of Enceladus with geysers in full force, obtained by Cassini while the sun (behind Enceladus) backlit the geysers and reflected light off Saturn illuminated the face of the moon. There couldn’t be a better lighting setup for a scenario like this! In a word:…
Titan’s High-Level Haze
Composite RGB spectral data image from Cassini’s latest flyby of Titan, September 24, 2010. Not much image adjustment needed, this was basically “out of the box”! I love the coloration in the different atmospheric layers. Original raw image can be seen here. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major. Flickr – Photo Sharing!
A Frozen Veil
A crescent-lit Enceladus ejects a frozen mist of water ice into space in this image, a combination of three raw files captured by the Cassini orbiter on September 22, 2010. At this high phase angle the jets become visible as the icy particles brightly reflect the sunlight passing almost directly through them towards Cassini’s lens….
Plume Zoom
Check this piece of coolness out… it’s an animation made of 30 frames of raw image data captured by Cassini during its August 13th flyby of Enceladus. It shows the little moon’s signature ice plumes erupting from fissures in the surface of its south pole as the spacecraft approaches. Neato!!! I saw it on The…
Shades of Saturn
Taken from a distance of over 1.5 million miles, this is a color-composite image of Saturn made by combining raw RGB spectral data captured on September 10, 2010 by the Cassini spacecraft. I love the cool blues, pale purples, barely-perceptable sea greens and warm sandy tans that tint the separate ascending and descending latitudes of…
Colors of the Rings
With Saturn in eclipse, the rings show off their colors in this image from Cassini taken on September 3, 2010. I assembled this image from three raw files taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue color filters. Some sharpening was applied and the resulting file doubled in pixel size. At the bottom of the image Saturn’s…
Details of Dione
Here’s some awesome just-released raw images from Cassini’s flyby of Dione earlier this morning! The low angle of sunlight brings out the detail of the moon’s rugged terrain, peppered with ancient craters of all sizes and gouged by long scars of steep, icy cliffs. Fantastic! Thanks to team leader Carolyn Porco for alerting us to…
Lights in the Dark 