A crescent-lit Enceladus ejects a frozen mist of water ice into space in this image, a combination of three raw files captured by the Cassini orbiter on September 22, 2010. At this high phase angle the jets become visible as the icy particles brightly reflect the sunlight passing almost directly through them towards Cassini’s lens….
Tag: Cassini
Plume Zoom
Check this piece of coolness out… it’s an animation made of 30 frames of raw image data captured by Cassini during its August 13th flyby of Enceladus. It shows the little moon’s signature ice plumes erupting from fissures in the surface of its south pole as the spacecraft approaches. Neato!!! I saw it on The…
Shades of Saturn
Taken from a distance of over 1.5 million miles, this is a color-composite image of Saturn made by combining raw RGB spectral data captured on September 10, 2010 by the Cassini spacecraft. I love the cool blues, pale purples, barely-perceptable sea greens and warm sandy tans that tint the separate ascending and descending latitudes of…
Colors of the Rings
With Saturn in eclipse, the rings show off their colors in this image from Cassini taken on September 3, 2010. I assembled this image from three raw files taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue color filters. Some sharpening was applied and the resulting file doubled in pixel size. At the bottom of the image Saturn’s…
Details of Dione
Here’s some awesome just-released raw images from Cassini’s flyby of Dione earlier this morning! The low angle of sunlight brings out the detail of the moon’s rugged terrain, peppered with ancient craters of all sizes and gouged by long scars of steep, icy cliffs. Fantastic! Thanks to team leader Carolyn Porco for alerting us to…
Equinox Revisited
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…
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”…
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…
Lights in the Dark 