Prometheus, shepherd moon of Saturn’s F ring, is featured in this dramatic image from Cassini taken as it passed by at a distance of 23,000 miles (37,014 km) on January 27, 2010. This is the closest Cassini has come to Prometheus. The image above has been extensively cleaned up in regard to CCD pixel noise…
Category: Saturn
Remembering Titan
This image was first released five years ago today, on January 15, 2005. It shows the murky surface of Saturn’s moon Titan as seen by the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe after it made its historic descent through the moon’s thick haze and clouds and landed in a frozen plain of methane mud and icy…
Groovy
Concentric ringlets within Saturn’s wide B-ring create a mesmerizing pattern in this raw image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken on January 11. Click for a full-size version; for me, looking at the bright ringlets too long can have a disorienting effect. Nearly 16,000 miles wide, the B ring system is estimated to be less than…
Cruisin’
Another look at Daphnis, this time in a beautiful color-calibrated RGB image by Gordan Ugarkovic. Click for a larger view. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI/Gordan Ugarkovic. Used with permission.
The Outside Track
This quick animation was created from 6 raw images taken by Cassini on January 7. Focusing on Saturn’s rings from above, the little shepherd moon Daphnis can be seen emerging from the planet’s cast shadow. Traveling within the Keeler gap, 5-mile-wide Daphnis pushes the ring material in front of it into scalloped waves and kicks…
Jet Setter
The icy Enceladus shows off its southern geysers, stately hovering in orbit around Saturn in this raw image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken on Christmas day. It is impressive to get such a clear view of the geysers with the low phase angle of the sunlight. Typically the geysers are only seen when the sun…
A Visit to Prometheus
This raw image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on December 26, 2009 (on a certain space blogger’s birthday, by the way) shows an amazing view of Prometheus, one of Saturn’s many shepherd moons. This is the closest yet that Cassini has come to the 96-mile-long oblong moon. Details of its cratered surface are visible, as…
Reflecting on Titan
This soon-to-be historic image, released today, shows a glint of sunlight reflecting off the surface of a lake on Titan. Taken by the Cassini spacecraft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) in July 2009, the image has been extensively researched by scientists to make sure it was in fact a reflection off of a liquid…
Senkyo Very Much
This is a close-up image of Senkyo, a large region on Titan made up of dark dune fields. Regions like this are called “low albedo” , or low reflectivity, areas and they wrap around the moon’s equatorial region. The dunes may be made up of material that falls from Titan’s thick smoglike atmosphere. When weather…
In the Stream of Stars
Titan floats in front of a streaked backdrop of stars in this photo from Cassini, taken on November 30. The Cassini orbiter was nearly a million and a half miles away from Titan when it took this image. Typically images aren’t exposed to capture both moons and stars…when they are, the results can be fascinating….
Eye on Iapetus
Saturn’s moon Iapetus shows its bright (and lumpy!) side in this image from Cassini, taken on November 29. Like many people I know, 914-mile-wide Iapetus has a dark side and a bright side, its bright surface composed of water ice and rock and its dark half a coating of material, most likely from the newly-discovered…
Rising from the Haze
No, it’s not the Enterprise emerging from Titan’s clouds, it’s Tethys, seen in the distance through the larger moon’s outer layer of hydrocarbon haze. Tethys’ giant Odysseus crater is easily visible adorning its north pole and slicing into its terminator. This image was taken on November 26, 2009 by the Cassini spacecraft at a…
Lights in the Dark 