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…
Category: Saturn
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…
Shades of Blue
Just some more Saturn beauty. Composite of raw image data in RGB filters from Cassini’s wide-angle camera, taken on July 15, 2010. (Not sure what moon that is.) Have a great weekend! Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major.
An Icy Crescent
A color-composite image of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, assembled from RGB raw image data recorded by Cassini on July 4, 2010. The moon’s heavily textured and highly-reflective icy terrain is nicely accentuated by the low angle of sunlight. The Cassini spacecraft was over 104,000 miles from Enceladus when the images were taken. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by…
Moons, Moons Everywhere
Released today, this image shows one of many small (half-mile wide) moons that orbit Saturn within the rings themselves, creating a “propellers” of gravitationally-tugged ring particles on either side of it. The Cassini team has been watching these interesting ring features for some time, and has carefully tracked eleven of the larger ones over the…
Daphnis Close-up
On July 5 the Cassini spacecraft took this image of Daphnis, a 4.5-mile-wide shepherd moon that orbits Saturn within the Keeler Gap. It’s the closest image yet of Daphnis, a moon that’s famous for the scallop-edged gravitational wake it makes on the edges of the gap as it passes. Read more on the Cassini mission…
Color Me Saturn
A somewhat truish colorized image of Saturn’s southern hemisphere, taken by Cassini on June 26, 2010 from a distance of 1,354,284 miles (that’s over five times the distance from Earth to the moon!) I substituted Cassini’s infrared and ultraviolet raw image channels for red and blue, respectively, and adjusted the combined results (with a native…
A World of Secrets
Wrapped in its clouds and haze Saturn’s moon Titan teases us with its secrets. What sort of strange geologic events are happening on its surface? Volcanoes oozing water ice, natural gas rainstorms, rivers flowing with liquid methane into enormous glassy lakes, temperatures that would freeze most Earthly creatures solid within minutes. And now, the big…
Life on Titan?
There’s been a lot of buzz in the space news world recently about findings by NASA scientists that may indicate the possibility of some sort of biological activity on Saturn’s cloud-covered moon, Titan. This has been carried to many different levels of excitement, depending on the individual reporters…what has NOT been announced is anything definitive…
Wispy Lines
A closer look at the surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, reveals some of its signature “wispy lines”…the bright exposed faces of steep cliffs on the icy 950-mile-wide moon. Taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 3, 2010, the image above has been level-adjusted to bring out surface details. Being composed of 75% water ice,…
Lights in the Dark 