Spectacular View of Saturn

Check out this amazing photograph (actually a composite of 141 images) of the Saturn ring system, taken from the post “The Day the Earth Smiled”.  Being backlit by the sun, the planet itself is mostly black, except for the faint reflection of the ring systems on the Northern hemisphere.  The blue outermost E ring is the collection of icy particles ejected from the geysers on Enceladus.  If you squint, you can see that moon’s tiny white dot between 8 and 9 o’clock:  

Backlit rings of Saturn

Backlit rings of Saturn

To get the full details, follow this link to the original 9000 x 3500 pixel image produced by the Cassini spacecraft team.  Not only can you see Saturn’s rings and several other moons in all their glory, but when you zoom in you can see that the inner planets Mars, Venus, and Earth have also had their portraits captured:

7699_18472_1_earth

Earth as seen from the far side of Saturn

Advertisement
This entry was posted in Fun Science and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Spectacular View of Saturn

  1. Pingback: Amazing Images from the Cassini Mission | Alexander Szewczak

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.