Since I haven’t posted in a while, I thought I’d put up this image I was playing with last week…it’s a raw image of Saturn’s moon Iapetus combined with a bit of a “glow” from an off-frame Sun and a few stars thrown into the background. Just for curiosity’s sake. 🙂 914-mile-wide Iapetus was discovered…
Tag: Cassini
May the 4th be with you…
Happy Star Wars Day! Now there’s a holiday I can really get into. 🙂 To celebrate, I felt that it would be appropriate to post about the most Star-Warsy object in our solar system: Saturn’s moon Mimas! Below is a repost from March 29, Now That’s a Moon! Here we go again… This portrait of…
Fast Eddy
A huge swirling eddy in Saturn’s northern equatorial bands is visible in this image from Cassini, taken in wavelengths of light sensitive to methane. The planet’s rings are a bright line, illuminated by the sun and casting their shadows onto Saturn’s cloudtops. This image was taken today, April 29. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Cassini Captures Saturn’s Lightning
This is a movie from the Cassini imaging team showing gigantic lightning flashes inside a storm cloud on Saturn! Depicting a 16-minute span of time, the movie shows lightning illuminating large, 300-km-diameter areas within the 3,000-km-long cloud. (The “zap zap” sounds were added later to represent the radio signals that were received by Cassini during…
In Living Color
I’ve been playing around with making color versions of images from the Cassini raw image downloads, now that I know what to look for it’s relatively easy to put together a somewhat “natural color” version of the sights around the Saturn system. (The image above was a little trickier, I had to take…
A Wrinkled World
Combined from 3 images taken in red, green and blue filters, this color composite image of Enceladus shows the little moon’s fractured terrain, varying from a heavily cratered north polar region to the corrugated texture of its mid-latitudes to the deep twisted grooves of its famous southern “tiger stripes”, the sources of its ice geysers…
Frozen Cliffs
One of the newest raw images from Cassini’s latest flyby shows the icy terrain of Saturn’s moon Dione, with steep hills, ridges and the bright face of one of the many deep canyons that meander across its surface. Known as “wispy lines”, these canyon walls expose bright water ice (that makes up about a quarter…
Rings of Light
Viewed from its night side sunlight illuminates Saturn’s atmosphere and rings, creating brilliant arcs of light in this image from Cassini, taken on February 13. Saturn’s shadow darkens the near side of the rings while their distant Sun-facing portion casts its own shadow into the atmosphere, in the bottom half of the image. The Cassini…
Flying Pan
Making a complete orbit in just under 14 hours, the 17-mile-wide shepherd moon Pan cruises around Saturn within the Encke gap in the A ring. In the image above, taken by Cassini on January 8, we can see Pan casting a sliver of a shadow onto the outer edge of the gap as it causes…
Little Sister
111-mile-wide Janus passes in front of the face of her much larger sister Titan in this image from Cassini, taken on March 27. At 3,200 miles wide, Titan is one of the largest moons in the solar system, even larger than the planet Mercury. A thick atmosphere keeps its frigid and gloomy surface permanently hidden…
Now That’s a Moon!
Just released today, this portrait of Saturn’s moon Mimas showcases its striking similarity to the Death Star (pre-proton torpedoes of course). The Cassini imaging team has been hard at work processing the images from last month’s flyby and the results sure don’t disappoint! On February 13 Cassini passed Mimas at a distance of 5,900 miles…
Rhea and the Rings
This is one of those sublime photos from Cassini that just make me smile. Taken on March 24, this raw image shows Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, suspended in orbit in front of the twilight side of Saturn, its rings reduced to a thin ribbon of bands at this viewing angle. The width of the rings…
Lights in the Dark 