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…
Tag: moon
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…
The Sun and the Moon
From an SDO image chosen as the Pick of the Week for October 15th, this shot is almost too cool to be real…but it is! As the New Moon passed between the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Sun, the spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit got a view of the Moon’s silhouetted disc passing across its normally-unobstructed…
Color Cast
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…
Carnival of Space 172
Wow. It’s been quite an exciting week in astronomy, with the passing of NASA’s much-needed budget proposal, the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for its final flight, China’s successful launch of its second lunar mission just this past Friday… and, of course, the monumental announcement of the discovery of a potentially Earthlike planet…
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:…
Lunar Hues
Look up at the moon on any clear night and you’ll see a cratered world shining down on you, in some phase of illumination or perhaps even full and round, with a few lighter or darker areas but for the most part all in cool, bright shades of whites and greys. The moon’s real colors…
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!
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…
Some Craters are the Pits
Look inside a 300-foot-deep pit on the Moon
Lights in the Dark 