With a leading side dark as charcoal and trailing side bright white, the 914-mile-wide Iapetus is literally the yin-and-yang of Saturn’s family of moons. The color variation on Iapetus is due to the fine coating of dark material that falls onto its leading hemisphere, possibly sent its way by smaller, distant Phoebe traveling within the…
Tag: photos from Cassini
Deep Impacts
This just in, a late straggler from Cassini’s recent flyby of Mimas. It shows the northern region of the “other side” of Mimas opposite the moon’s signature Herschel crater. The sheer walls of some of the craters near the top left are 2-3 miles high – or deep, depending on how you look at it…
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…
Big Sisters
Rhea and Titan, Saturn’s two largest moons, align in Cassini’s lens in this image taken on November 19, 2009. I level-adjusted and rotated the original raw image file…”north” would be to the right in this view. Rhea is 949 miles wide, cold, icy and airless. Titan, 3,200 miles wide, is also frigidly cold but is…
Lights in the Dark 