Here’s an image of Titan as seen by Cassini on May 23, 2010. I combined data from the red, green and blue color filters as well as overlaying some surface detail of the moon’s dark dune fields captured with the spacecraft’s cloud-piercing near-infrared camera. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/J. Major
Tag: Saturn
A Clouded Giant
Image data are now coming in from today’s flyby of Titan, the image above is a rotated color-composite made from three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible light color filters. (I think I got the north-south alignment right…) Titan’s high-level hydrocarbon haze is visible, a pale blue and violet band encircling…
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,…
Peekaboo Moon
Here’s another color composite from Cassini, showing Rhea on the far side of the rings, its northern tip peeking through the Cassini Division. (I’m not 100% sure what smaller moon that is on the left, but my guess is either Janus or Epimetheus.) What I find interesting in this image is the bright streak within…
Skimming the Rings
Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea passes across the face of the ringed planet in this image, color-combined from three raw images taken by Cassini on May 8, 2010. The rings are seen on edge here, a dark horizontal stripe running underneath the cratered 950-mile-wide moon, their wide shadows cast onto Saturn’s atmosphere below. I really love…
The Light of a Distant Sun
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…
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…
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…
Lights in the Dark 