Dark swirling vortices march along Saturn’s “storm alley” in this section of an image taken by Cassini on May 19, 2008. (It was recently uploaded as a featured image on JPL’s Flickr page.) Storms on Saturn are huge and powerful, with winds blowing many hundreds of miles per hour and often featuring lightning ten thousand…
Tag: Cassini
From the LITD Archives: Wave Forms
(Originally posted on June 27, 2009) Cast shadows reveal some interesting structure in the waves sent up by little Daphnis in this image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 26, 2009. Daphnis orbits Saturn within the 26-mile-wide Keeler gap in the A ring. Its gravity disrupts the edges of the gap, carving scalloped edges in…
Good Vibrations
Dynamic spike-like structures along the edges of Saturn’s rings are caused by oscillations of material that mimics the behavior of our entire galaxy…in other words, Saturn’s rings are a miniature version of the Milky Way! Along the outer edge of the dense B ring Cassini mission scientists have observed ring particles rising above the ringplane…
Peak Time
A crater’s central peak casts a long shadow in this image from Cassini, taken on October 17 as the spacecraft passed by Dione at a distance of 25,000 miles. 700-mile-wide Dione is literally covered in craters, faults and gouges, a testament to the ancient age of its frozen terrain. Many larger craters – like the…
A Setting Titan
A series of 13 raw images from Cassini, taken October 18, 2010, has been looped together to create this animation showing Titan “setting” behind the nighttime limb of Saturn. Check out the refraction along Saturn’s atmosphere! Very cool. (The images are oriented so the ringplane – seen at left – is running vertically.) This is the view…
Stars and Stripes (and Titan!)
A color-composite RGB image of Titan, with a sliver of the rings and a scattering of stars in the background, taken by Cassini on October 18, 2010 from a distance of over 1.53 million miles. At 3,200 miles in diameter Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, boasting a complex – yet chilly – atmosphere…
Enceladus and the E Ring
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…
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…
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!
Lights in the Dark 