Getting tired of incredibly beautiful Saturn images yet? No? Then try this one:
This is actually a composite of 36 separate images (12 each of red, green, and blue) to make a realistically-colored image of the ringworld. Cassini was over 1.2 million kilometers from Saturn when it took these images — about 3 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It’s orbiting Saturn on a highly inclined plane, so it can get these stunning views "from a height" as it were.
This also means that twice per orbit Cassini passes through Saturn’s ring plane. What does that look like? Well, glad you asked:
Click on those images for access to higher-res versions. There are plenty of other images released today too, and they’re all quite beautiful. Of course! It’s Saturn!
March 1st, 2007 at 11:59 am
Ha, I shall never become tired of cool Saturn photos!
Nice one of the crossing of the ring planes too.
Staying tuned…
March 1st, 2007 at 12:25 pm
It appears that the north side of the rings have a different coloring or shading than the south side? Is that a trick of the light, the position of Cassini, and effect of the color process with the images, or is it possible that the two sides could be colored differently?
March 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I wonder how many fewer astronomers there would be in the world if we were not fortunate enough to have Saturn so close to us.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:03 pm
How many here remember the commercials years ago that sold cleaning products to “get rid of that bathtub ring”? Saturn has a “planetary ring”. Perhaps someone could sell the solar system an Amway product to clean that up. No more embarassing rings!
March 1st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
No, not Amway – I remember them being like a cult! My step-mother got snagged into their web many years ago – oh, it was awful. And the products were no better than a bottle of Fantastic. She’d have the Amway people over and I likened them to Stepford Wives. (Thanks, but no thanks for reminding me.)
Saturn is easily the coolest-looking planet in our solar system – rings are just fine when it comes to planets!
But Mars is still my sentimental favorite.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:11 pm
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It appears that the north side of the rings have a different coloring or shading than the south side? Is that a trick of the light, the position of Cassini, and effect of the color process with the images, or is it possible that the two sides could be colored differently?
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One side is front lit. The other side is back lit.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I can see five satellites in that video clip; three of them seem to be shepherding moons. Anyone know which ones they are (as in, their names)?
March 1st, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Anyone know how I can save a that mpeg to my HDD? It’s in a javascript window.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
What stunning sights there are, even in our own planetary system. Even for a Saturn picture, that’s a winner.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:49 pm
When I was in 8th or 9th grade, I built a telescope (4 1/2″, f10, ground my own mirror using a kit from Edmond Scientific, my dad help me build a mount from pipe fixtures, made a tube from a piece of 6″ galvanized A/C duct…) The very first thing I looked at, other than the neighbor’s TV antenna and chimney while I was trying to get the finder aligned, was Saturn. 40 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday!
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:35 am
There are actually six moons visiible in the clip. The shepherds are Prometheus and Pandora. Near them is Epimetheus. The one further out when the others are around is Enceladus (it’s larger). Further out still and much larger is Janus, and the big one that comes around by itself is Mimas.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:44 am
Plus, the movie is available in two formats (MPEG and Quicktime) at the JPL Cassini-Huygens site along with others
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=147
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:46 am
Apparently I shouldn’t have put a link in my post – so I’ll repeat it sans link since I don’t know how long it will take to get approved:
Plus, the movie is available in two formats (MPEG and Quicktime) at the JPL Cassini-Huygens site along with others
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=147
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:02 am
I love the image that goes with the title “The Lore of Saturn”. Such cloud detail and subtle inner rings. A dramatic view any space artist would admire.
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:49 am
Oh, you know these are faked images, where are the stars?
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 am
[...] to the Bad Astronomer for the [...]
March 3rd, 2007 at 1:51 am
Awesome, beautiful. By far the best looking planet in our solar sytem.
March 4th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Forgive my ignorance, but it looks as if Saturn is occluding
its rings in both the upper and the lower parts of the image.
This makes it look as if the rings are “below” the planet, and
not around its waist. Is that some sort of optical illusion, or is
it caused by the images being overexposed, or due to this being
a composite?
March 4th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
The planet is masking the rings at the upper half of the picture. At the lower half it has the appearance of masking because the ring in that region is very low-density. The inner-ring is partially transparent, and the planetary disk is so much brighter that it washes it out.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
A mosaic from the same raw images made by image processing geeks was actually published one month earlier than the official version at http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000847 – and this ain’t the first such case where amateurs have beaten the pros from a space mission …