Four of Saturn’s 62 moons are seen passing each other in this animation, composed from 22 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 27, 2010. Epimetheus, Prometheus, Janus and tiny Atlas all orbit Saturn within or near the ring system. As the animation begins, the potato-shaped Prometheus is just “rounding the bend” inside…
Tag: solar system
Pillar of Fire
Ok it’s not fire, it’s plasma, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful image by space photographer Alan Friedman showing a coronal ejection towering over 200,000 miles above the surface of the sun. It was taken on July 27, 2010. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) occur when particularly large magnetic loops filled with plasma “snap” and expel their…
Shades of Blue
Just some more Saturn beauty. Composite of raw image data in RGB filters from Cassini’s wide-angle camera, taken on July 15, 2010. (Not sure what moon that is.) Have a great weekend! Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major.
Color Me Saturn
A somewhat truish colorized image of Saturn’s southern hemisphere, taken by Cassini on June 26, 2010 from a distance of 1,354,284 miles (that’s over five times the distance from Earth to the moon!) I substituted Cassini’s infrared and ultraviolet raw image channels for red and blue, respectively, and adjusted the combined results (with a native…
Meteor? Darn near killed ‘er.
The bright “fireball” on Jupiter captured on camera the morning of June 3 by amateur astronomers Anthony Wesley and Christopher Go (a still image from Anthony’s video is above, rotated and cropped) is now believed to have been a meteor burning up high in the planet’s atmosphere, and not an impact like the July 2009…
Jupiter Takes a Hit…Again!
Even as the Hubble team released the image above detailing the scars from the July 2009 asteroid impact on Jupiter, another object was on a collision course with our solar system’s giant planet…and Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was at his station (yet again!) and captured an image of the impact! Read all about it…
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…
In Living Color
I’ve been playing around with making color versions of images from the Cassini raw image downloads, now that I know what to look for it’s relatively easy to put together a somewhat “natural color” version of the sights around the Saturn system. (The image above was a little trickier, I had to take…
Frozen Cliffs
One of the newest raw images from Cassini’s latest flyby shows the icy terrain of Saturn’s moon Dione, with steep hills, ridges and the bright face of one of the many deep canyons that meander across its surface. Known as “wispy lines”, these canyon walls expose bright water ice (that makes up about a quarter…
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 