Little Enceladus and enormous Titan are seen on either side of Saturn’s rings in this image, a color-composite I made from raw images acquired by Cassini on March 12, 2012. Read more here.
Tag: Cassini
Rugged Rhea
Here’s a color-composite image of Rhea, made from raw images acquired by Cassini during a flyby on March 10, 2012. The color is derived from images taken in infrared, green and ultraviolet light.
Titan. In color.
On Jan. 30, the Cassini spacecraft executed a flyby maneuver of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, passing within 19,340 miles (31,130 km) of its surface. This color composite image of the cloud-covered moon was created by combining raw data acquired with Cassini’s Imaging Science System (ISS) in red, green, blue and clear color channels. The result…
From the LITD Archives: Eclipsing Mimas
Originally published on May 16, 2009. LITD is almost 3 years old! This animation, made from a series of 8 raw images taken by Cassini on May 14, shows Saturn’s moon Mimas being eclipsed by another object…..a neighboring moon, perhaps? It’s not mentioned, but it definitely seems to be something of similar size, and round….
The Colors of Titan’s Sky
Made from one of the most recent Cassini images, this is a color-composite showing a backlit Titan with its dense, multi-layered atmosphere scattering sunlight in different colors. Titan’s atmosphere is made up of methane and complex hydrocarbons and is ten times as thick as Earth’s. It is the only moon in our solar system known to have…
Saturn’s Spooky Sounds
Here’s a bit of space spookiness just in time for the Halloween season! It’s a recording of the intense radio emissions coming from Saturn, as detected by the Cassini spacecraft’s radio and plasma wave science instrument on November 22, 2003. Not exactly a direct audio recording (since Cassini is in space where there’s no “sound”…
Fantastic Four
New image from Cassini and the CICLOPS imaging team shows Titan, Dione, Pan and Pandora in the same shot! Pan is furthest to the left, a tiny moon tucked into the gap in the rings. Dione hovers in front of the cloud-covered Titan, and Pandora is the football-shaped moon just outside the edge of the…
Latest Images of Enceladus
On Saturday, Oct. 1, the Cassini spacecraft performed another flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Passing by at a distance of only 62 miles (99 km) Cassini took some fantastic images of the 318-mile-wide moon — most notably of its signature plumes of water ice spraying from fissures along its south pole!
Moons of Three
Saturn’s moons Dione and Titan lined up with the planet’s rings, seen here nearly edge-on, from the point of view of the Cassini spacecraft’s camera on September 17, 2011. This is a composite of three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible-light clear filters. Dione, 700 miles wide, is dwarfed by the…
High Over Hyperion
The Cassini spacecraft passed by Saturn’s spongy-looking moon Hyperion yesterday, August 25, and returned some very dramatic images like the one seen here – fascinating! At 15,000 miles this was Cassini’s second-closest approach to Hyperion. It will pass by again on September 16 at just over twice that distance. The closest it has come to Hyperion…
Daphnis in Full Color
If you’ve been following along with Lights in the Dark since the beginning, you may know that this is one of my favorite subjects of space imagery: the shepherd moon Daphnis, traveling in its orbit around Saturn within the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap. Recently color-calibrated by Gordan Ugarvovic, this is a true-color version of an image…
More Hope for Life on Enceladus?
Researchers on the Cassini mission team have identified large salt grains in the plumes emanating from Saturn’s icy satellite Enceladus, making an even stronger case for the existence of a salty liquid ocean beneath the moon’s frozen surface.
Lights in the Dark 