Saturn’s expansive rings cast but a thin line of a shadow across its equator in this beautiful high-angle view taken by Cassini on July 18, 2009. The rings, normally overexposed in images to make them more visible, are instead underexposed here so some of the details of Saturn’s atmosphere can be seen. Intricate banding of…
Tag: solar system
The Oceans of Venus?
It’s hard to imagine, with its pressure-cooked 800º baked-rock surface, but Venus may have once had oceans, suggests data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter. Extensive infrared mapping of Venus’ southern hemisphere shows large areas of rock that appears to be granite. Granite, as we know it on Earth, is formed when basalt…
Three Little Moons
A little family portrait from the house of Saturn. Enceladus, Tethys and Dione. Okay, they weren’t really all lined up like that….I combined three raw shots from Cassini, taken over the weekend, and lined them up nicely. Approximate sizes in relation to each other. Just for fun. Great images though! Tethys’ huge 250-mile-wide Odysseus crater…
Sunday Best
Another fantastic image of one of my favorite subjects from the Cassini mission: the little shepherd moon Daphnis and its icy wake within the Keeler gap. This is an adjusted version of a raw image taken Saturday, July 11, and received at the imaging center in Boulder, CO later the same day. See the original…
Subtle Shades
The intricate structure of Saturn’s rings is seen here in this raw image from Cassini, taken yesterday. This (I believe) shows the dark material of the Cassini Division (bottom) below the brighter bands of the A ring (middle to top). I could be mistaken though, and this is instead the inner section of the B…
A MONDo Idea
Interesting article from New Scientist: A Phantom Menace to Dark Matter Theory by Marcus Chown. In a nutshell, there’s a new theory that tries to explain why stars aren’t chucked out of the galaxy when they are near the edges, like a little kid on the playground merry-go-round. (Hey, it happens.) Newtonian physics say that this…
Rhea View
A fascinating bit of work by Gordan Ugarkovic, this is a brief false-color animation of 950-mile-wide Rhea, second-largest moon of Saturn. Rhea is very reflective, indicating that it is made up of a lot of water ice, and is also heavily cratered (clearly evident here.) Water ice behaves like rock at the low temperatures that…
Phoenix’s Sense of Snow
The results are in: Mars has (or had) a favorable environment for life. Microbial life, sure, but life nonetheless. This is according to the results posted in this week’s edition of the journal Science, from the Phoenix Mars polar lander. The data indicates that the region around the lander has subsurface layers of perchlorate, a…
Rings Around Uranus
This ghostly image was taken by a Chilean ground-based telescope in 2002. It shows the enigmatic gas giant Uranus in near-infrared light, 7 of its 27 known moons visible. (For a labeled version of this image noting the moons, click here.) Seventh planet from the sun, Uranus’ year is 84 Earth-years long. Like the other…
Shepherds Passing
Without as much as a wave shepherd moons Prometheus and Atlas pass by each other, each on their own paths around the rings. Prometheus, casting a long shadow, pulls at the F ring’s bands of material while smaller Atlas guards the edges of the A ring. The larger is 93 miles across at its…
Out of the Shadows
A stunning image by Cassini, received today, of Daphnis splashing through the Keeler Gap (as seen in my last post). In this photo the sunlight is coming from the opposite direction though. Saturn’s massive shadow falls upon the rings on the right side of this image. Background stars can be seen through the rings. From…
Wave Forms
Cast shadows reveal some interesting structure in the waves sent up by little Daphnis in this image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 26, 2009. Daphnis orbits Saturn within the 26-mile-wide Keeler gap in the A ring. Its gravity disrupts the edges of the gap, carving scalloped edges in the ring material and also,…
Lights in the Dark 