This is a color composite image of Rhea (pronounced REE-ah) I made from raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on March 9, 2013, during its most recent — and final — close pass of the moon. The visible-light colors of Rhea’s frozen surface have been oversaturated to make them more apparent… even so, it’s…
Category: Saturn
The Colors of Saturn’s Northern Skies
Bored by blue? Saturn’s skies sure do have a lot more colors, as seen here in a color-somposite made from raw Cassini images acquired on Feb. 27, 2013. With spring progressing on Saturn’s northern hemisphere (a season that takes 7 1/2 Earth years to pass!) the upper latitudes gradually receive more sunlight and thus more…
Voyager’s Grand Tour: a Webcomic
Do you like space exploration? Do you like comics? Then this is for you. “Voyager” is a webcomic by LA-based artist Jed McGowan about the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched from Kennedy Space Center on September 5, 1977. Over the next three years it flew by Jupiter and Saturn, taking unprecedented photos of the giant planets…
That’s No Space Station, It’s a MOON!
First Alderaan, then Prometheus?? Here we go again! Saturn’s moon Mimas looks uncannily like the Death Star, and this animation by Diamond Sky Productions makes the resemblance even more apparent. Now witness the power of this fully-armed battle station! (No shepherd moons were harmed in the making of this video.) Video © Diamond Sky Productions,…
Floes of Frozen Methane May Be Floating on Titan’s Lakes
Although surface temperatures on Titan are cold enough that methane can exist as a liquid, filling lakes and flowing in streams, it may sometimes get so cold that even the liquid methane and ethane freezes, forming floes and icebergs of frozen hydrocarbons. This Titanic revelation was announced today during the 221st American Astronomical Society meeting…
Ghosts of Worlds Passed
Saturn’s F ring is a fascinating structure. Made of fine icy particles — most no larger than the particulates found in cigarette smoke — it orbits Saturn just outside the A ring and is easily perturbed by the gravity of nearby moons and embedded moonlets, which create streamers and clumps that rise up in fanciful…
Cassini’s Christmas Gift: a Peek at Prometheus
Captured on Christmas Day, this is a raw image from Cassini showing Saturn’s F ring buckling inwards at two places due to the gravitational tug of its inner shepherd moon, Prometheus, seen at center. As the irregularly-shaped moon approaches the ring material in its looping orbit around Saturn it draws material from the ring in…
A Colorful Christmas Moon
Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone! Here’s your present from Lights in the Dark: a color-composite of Saturn’s moon Dione, lovingly made from raw images captured by the Cassini spacecraft on December 23. 700 miles (1120 km) wide, Dione (pronounced DEE-oh-nee) is covered pole-to-pole in craters and is crisscrossed by deep chasms and long, bright…
Saturn’s Backlit Beauty
As a sort of Christmas gift to the world, the Cassini mission team released this image today, a majestic mosaic showing the planet Saturn gleaming in backlit sunlight. “Of all the many glorious images we on Cassini have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those we have taken from within Saturn’s shadow,”…
A River Runs Through It (and when I say “It” I mean Saturn’s moon Titan)
No, you’re not looking down at the Amazon or the Nile (although the confusion would be understandable)… this is actually a river on an entirely different world: Saturn’s moon Titan! Radar imaging by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appears to be a long river system, complete with side-branching tributaries, meandering across the surface of…
Saturn’s Stunning, Swirling Cyclone
Oh man. It’s stuff like this that got me into space blogging in the first place. Landing here on Earth last night, this is one of several new raw images from Cassini acquired yesterday (Nov. 27) showing the enormous cyclone of clouds swirling around Saturn’s geographic north pole. The angle of sunlight highlights the multilayered…
Titan: Dabbling in the Occult
Back in December of 2001, Saturn’s moon Titan passed in front of two background stars (called an “occultation”) from the point of view of the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. Astronomers used the incredible resolving ability of the 5-meter telescope’s adaptive optics to watch the event, which revealed the diffraction of the stars’ light through…
Lights in the Dark 