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Cassini strikes again! New images have been released, as well as incredible animated images of moons moving, passing in front of one another, going past Saturn. One, maybe my favorite, is of tiny Pan nestled in the rings of Saturn.
The image above is of Titan (the big fuzzy tennis ball) and Enceladus. At the time Cassini took this shot, Enceladus was 4.1 million kilometers away, and Titan was 5.3 million. Our own Moon is only 384,000 kilometers from Earth, by comparison.’
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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June 22nd, 2006 at 5:52 pm
These pictures…: Wow!
jbs
June 23rd, 2006 at 9:48 am
all of the stuff from cassini has totally blown my mind. can all of these images be real? i’m just old enough to remember when these types of scenes only occurred in “2001: a space odyssey”. the voyager stuff from the outer planets still seems fresh to me. now i feel like i’m living in “THE FUTURE” (insert mark hamill ‘incredible vista’ hand gesture here).
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:24 pm
The dark side of Enceladus seems to glow a bit. Is that the reflection from Saturn?
June 23rd, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Man, Titan is HUGE. (Yeah, I know, that’s why it’s called Titan, but still…wow!)
June 24th, 2006 at 12:26 am
JPL’s Cassini web-site also released a video that is essentially a composite of all the photographs taken by the Huygens probe during descent. It also added some “bells and whistles” indicating where the photographs were taken, how the craft was oriented, etc. It will give you a moment of Zen.
June 24th, 2006 at 4:02 am
Thanks for bringing that link to our attention. While watching it the second time I thought that if they have an installation of The Way Things Go on a TV in the contemporary art section of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, that could certainly be there. It’s a bit trippy as Titan appears to grow like a souffle on a plate–then poof! The Cassini-Huygens team blends science and creativity quite nicely…always great images.
June 24th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Enceladus has a volcanic “hot spot” centred on its South Pole, which vents gas into Space.
June 25th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Very cool pic. Cassini is marvellous, and has given us so much new data about Saturn and its moons, and so many wonderful images. I have the ESA Cassini-Huygens site bookmarked.
June 26th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Just Wow. The direct size comparison is visually stunning. Cassini rocks.