* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Saturn

Blobrana · L

With the Sun directly behind Cassini, the spacecraft spies the opposition surge in Saturn's inner A ring. The opposition effect becomes visible from this special viewing geometry.

Expand (93kb, 976 x 976)
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This view looks toward the rings from about 11 degrees below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 2, 2006 at a distance of approximately 287,000 kilometres from Saturn. Image scale is 17 kilometres per pixel.

Blobrana · L

This photo of Saturns south pole was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on December 01, 2006, when it was approximately 727,801 kilometres away.

Expand (28kb, 1024 x 1024)
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the MT3 and CL2 filters.

Blobrana · L

This image of the shadow of Saturns rings cast onto the planets atmosphere was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on November 30, 2006, when it was approximately 1,271,267 kilometres away.

Expand (34kb, 1024 x 1024)
Credit NASA

The image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.

Blobrana · L

This image of Saturn was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on November 11, 2006, when it was approximately 1,169,256 kilometres away.

Expand (65kb, 1024 x 1024)
Credit NASA

The image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.

Blobrana · L

This image of Saturn was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on November 06, 2006.
The image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

Expand (74kb, 1024 x 936)
Credit NASA

Blobrana · L

This image of Saturn was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on October 30, 2006, when it was approximately 1,311,116 kilometres away.

Expand (124kb, 1024 x 858)
Credit NASA

The image was taken using the CL1 and MT2 filters.

Blobrana · L

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.
This marvellous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Colour in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural colour.

Expand (12kb, 560 x 277)
Credit NASA

The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn's shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn's faint rings.
Ring structures containing these tiny particles brighten substantially at high phase angles: i.e., viewing angles where the sun is almost directly behind the objects being imaged.
During this period of observation Cassini detected two new faint rings: one coincident with the shared orbit of the moons Janus and Epimetheus, and another coincident with Pallene's orbit.
The narrowly confined G ring is easily seen here, outside the bright main rings. Encircling the entire system is the much more extended E ring. The icy plumes of Enceladus, whose eruptions supply the E ring particles, betray the moon's position in the E ring's left-side edge.
Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometres away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.
Small grains are pushed about by sunlight and electromagnetic forces. Hence their distribution tells much about the local space environment.

Blobrana · L

This false-colour mosaic of Saturn shows deep-level clouds silhouetted against Saturn's glowing interior. The image was made with data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which can image the planet at 352 different wavelengths.

Expand (31kb, 825 x 763)
Credit NASA

This mosaic shows the entire planet, including features like Saturn's ring shadows and the terminator, the boundary between day and night.
The data were obtained in February 2006 at a distance of 1.6 million kilometres from directly over the plane of Saturn's rings, which appear here as a thin, blue line over the equator. The image was constructed from images taken at wavelengths of 1.07 microns shown in blue, 2.71 microns shown in green, and 5.02 microns shown in red.
The blue-green colour (lower right) is sunlight scattered off clouds high in Saturn's atmosphere and the red colour (upper left) is the glow of thermal radiation from Saturn's warm interior, easily seen on Saturn's night side (top left), within the shadow of the rings, and with somewhat less contrast on Saturn's day side (bottom right). The darker areas within Saturn show the strongest thermal radiation. The bright red colour indicates areas where Saturn's atmosphere is relatively clear. The great variety of cloud shapes and sizes reveals a surprisingly active planet below the overlying sun-scattering haze.
The brighter glow of the northern hemisphere versus the southern indicates that the clouds and hazes there are noticeably thinner than those in the south. Scientists speculate that this is a seasonal effect, and if so, it will change as the northern hemisphere enters springtime during the next few years.

Source

Blobrana · L

This image of Saturn was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on September 15, 2006, when it was approximately 1,997,032 kilometres away.

Credit NASA

The image was taken using the IR3 and CL2 filters.