Captured on Christmas Day, this is a raw image from Cassini showing Saturn’s F ring buckling inwards at two places due to the gravitational tug of its inner shepherd moon, Prometheus, seen at center. As the irregularly-shaped moon approaches the ring material in its looping orbit around Saturn it draws material from the ring in…
Tag: Saturn
A Colorful Christmas Moon
Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone! Here’s your present from Lights in the Dark: a color-composite of Saturn’s moon Dione, lovingly made from raw images captured by the Cassini spacecraft on December 23. 700 miles (1120 km) wide, Dione (pronounced DEE-oh-nee) is covered pole-to-pole in craters and is crisscrossed by deep chasms and long, bright…
Saturn’s Backlit Beauty
As a sort of Christmas gift to the world, the Cassini mission team released this image today, a majestic mosaic showing the planet Saturn gleaming in backlit sunlight. “Of all the many glorious images we on Cassini have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those we have taken from within Saturn’s shadow,”…
Saturn’s Stunning, Swirling Cyclone
Oh man. It’s stuff like this that got me into space blogging in the first place. Landing here on Earth last night, this is one of several new raw images from Cassini acquired yesterday (Nov. 27) showing the enormous cyclone of clouds swirling around Saturn’s geographic north pole. The angle of sunlight highlights the multilayered…
Titan: Dabbling in the Occult
Back in December of 2001, Saturn’s moon Titan passed in front of two background stars (called an “occultation”) from the point of view of the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. Astronomers used the incredible resolving ability of the 5-meter telescope’s adaptive optics to watch the event, which revealed the diffraction of the stars’ light through…
Daphnis Is Back!
It’s been a while since I posted an image of my favorite moon of Saturn, but while looking through some recent raw images returned by the Cassini spacecraft I spotted it: Daphnis, the little sculptor shepherd moon!
Titan: Saturn’s Glow-In-The-Dark Moon
Titan just never ceases to amaze. Saturn’s largest moon, it’s wrapped in a complex, multi-layered nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere ten times thicker than Earth’s. It has seasons and weather, as evidenced by the occasional formation of large bright clouds and, more recently, an area of open-cell convection forming over its south pole. Titan even boasts the distinction…
A Spooky Space Ghost for Halloween!
Looking like something out of a Tim Burton movie, the eerie shapes seen above are part of a cloud of gas and dust located 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. First identified in 1966, the human-like figures with “arms” raised give the nebula its spooky nickname: the “Ghost Nebula”.
Once you realize what this Cassini image is showing, you’ll love it.
Go ahead, take a look. Let it sink in…..waaaait for it…… there. I told you. Still wondering what it is you’re looking at? That’s ok, you’ll love it even after I tell you.
Cassini Peeks at Titan’s Southern Vortex
A color-composite image of Titan shows Saturn’s largest moon in true color, including its recently-discovered southern vortex forming above its south pole. The image was assembled from three raw images acquired on August 28 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in red, green and blue visible light color channels. The background was extended in size to better…
Titan’s Beautiful, Boiling Southern Vortex
Thanks to Cassini’s new vantage point granted by its inclined orbit researchers have gotten a new look at the south pole of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. What they’ve recently discovered is a swirling vortex of gas forming over the moon’s pole, likely the result of the approach of winter on Titan’s southern hemisphere. Read the…
The Colors of Titan and Saturn
The pumpkin-orange colors of Titan’s thick clouds appear in stark contrast in front of the limb of Saturn, which appears quite blue along its sunlit limb due to Rayleigh scattering, the same process that makes the sky look blue here on Earth. The image here is a color composite made from three separate raw images…
Lights in the Dark 