Wednesday 19 December 2012

From the Shadow of Saturn

NASA's space probe Cassini is still in orbit around Saturn, and boy does this image take the biscuit.


Taken as Cassini passed behind the planet, with the Sun obscured by Saturn, it was pieced together from dozens of smaller images into the full thing. Wow, the more I look at this image the more I see:
  • That diffuse light on the dark side of Saturn is 'ringshine' as sunlight scatters from the icy disc. You can even see the rings in shadow on the very ringshine they've created.
  • There's the illuminated zone around the planet where Saturn's thick atmosphere has bent the rays of light from our sun around the planet into Cassini's eyes. 
  • The first bright dot to the bottom left of Saturn is Enceladus. Not only can you see this tiny world circling Saturn, you can also see it spewing out icy organic material into the solar system. And that pale blue smear around the bottom? That's the E-ring fed by Enceladus's cryovolcanism.
  • The big disk on the bottom left is another of Saturns wonderful moons. I hoped it was Titan, the hazy Earth-like moon with a thick atmosphere, methane weather and strange organic chemistry. Unfortunately its the rather less dynamic Tethys, but it still adds to an extraordinary image.
  • The smaller dot, just to the right of Enceladus, is probably a planet. From the planets today, its got to be either Jupiter or Earth. Being this far from the Sun means Earth is hidden behind Saturn itself on this occasion, although a previous image from 2006 showed our planet as a Pale Blue Dot once more.
In summary, the universe is unbelievably beautiful, and the more we understand about it, the more beautiful it gets.

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