Another awesome upload by Gordan Ugarkovic, here’s a color-composite image from Cassini data taken in December 2009 showing a jetting Enceladus lit by “Saturnshine” – reflected diffused sunlight from an off-frame Saturn – and given a Saturn-y coloration at the same time! Icy Enceladus is typically a bright white color, with some grey and…
Tag: Enceladus
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:…
A Frozen Veil
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….
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…
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”…
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…
Through the Plumes
Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society calls this “the most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet.” While I like some of the images from November’s flyby a bit more, this is still very, very cool! It is a combination of two images (processed by unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0) taken during the same flyby event,…
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…
This Week in Space
Get informed with the latest space-related news on This Week in Space from SpaceflightNow!
Moons Near and Far…and More to Come!
246-mile-wide Mimas (foreground) and 70-mile-wide Epimetheus bracket a section of Saturn’s rings in this color-calibrated image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken in October 2009. Happily, we can expect to see beautiful images like this for another 7 years…NASA has extended the Cassini mission until at least 2017! During that time Cassini will transition into its…
Jet Setter
The icy Enceladus shows off its southern geysers, stately hovering in orbit around Saturn in this raw image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken on Christmas day. It is impressive to get such a clear view of the geysers with the low phase angle of the sunlight. Typically the geysers are only seen when the sun…
Ennie and the Jets
Another great image from the latest flyby of Enceladus by the Cassini spacecraft, this one shows three frigid plumes firing off into space from the moon’s south pole. More images from the flyby can be seen on my previous posts, or by going to the CICLOPS site listed in the sidebar. This last flyby…
Lights in the Dark 