Comments on: Saturn's shadow slices the rings

By: How Many Rings Does Saturn Have | David Reneke | Space and Astronomy News

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 22:40:18 +0000

[...] Saturn’s shadow slices the rings (blogs.discovermagazine.com) var fbShare = {url: 'http://www.davidreneke.com/how-many-rings-does-saturn-have/',size: 'large',} Sharing is caring. [...]

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 22:18:48 +0000

Sixth, even though the cut of the shadow seems straight, you can discern a slight curve to it, due to Saturn being a sphere.

By: Kinetico

Kinetico — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:07:40 +0000

@kahlisana

At first I thought “tie interceptor”, but a raider fits the bill too!

Imagine if we had ring shine here on earth, some parts of the planet would not need street lights!

By: Clint L

Clint L — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:44:28 +0000

Thanks.

By: SkyGazer

SkyGazer — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 06:56:32 +0000

It will fill up again.

By: Clint L

Clint L — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:38:55 +0000

I have a question.
So we solve enough of the problems with space travel and head out to Saturn. The rings are made in part of water ice, which we need to survive out there.
With our ship we dive into the rings and scoop up a few hundred tonnes of ice cubes. This would remove several kilometres of “ring”.
Will the remaining ring material spread out to fill the gap or would there forever be a gap?

By: Pete Jackson

Pete Jackson — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:29:14 +0000

As I tend to do with pics like these, I have desaturated the blackness:

http://chinesemeridiansblueprintsoflife.com/Images/Saturn.jpg

This is now really cool. The part of Saturn’s disk below the rings can now be seen by light that has scattered through the rings and then scattered again off the disk of Saturn. Note that the equator of Saturn is the darkest, because the rings cannot be seen either by reflected light or scattered light there. And the shadow of Saturn on the rings is still completely black. In theory one should see some light there that has been reflected off the rings to the northern part of Saturn’s disk and then reflected back to the rings, and then scattered through the rings but the exposure time on the camera was presumably not long enough to see that deep.

I’m definitely going to make a poster of this image. Thanks for posting it, Phil!

By: SkyGazer

SkyGazer — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:52:29 +0000

@sheldonc
That pic is a stunner, specially because we are photobombing it.

By: sheldonc

sheldonc — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:03:30 +0000

What a fantastic image.

Saturn’s rings are so cool! The fact that they have waves and dark “spokes” and there’s even little moonlets embedded in the A and B rings just makes them more and more mysterious and amazing.

One of my favorite images is Saturn eclipsing the sun as seen from Cassini.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090111.html

By: kahlisana

kahlisana — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:52:21 +0000

Looks like a Cylon Raider to me…