We start off a new year, 2015, with an interesting cosmic alignment. Here we see two of Saturn’s moons; Tethys and Rhea nicely lined up with about a quarter of each in shadow. This picture was taken by the Cassini probe’s narrow-angle camera in red light at a distance of about 1.8 million kilometers from Rhea. The lit side of the moons is the one facing away from Saturn.
The one thing that never really gets old is a visual representation of the size of Saturn, especially when compared to some of its moons. This is one such case where the Cassini-Huygens mission, which is a joint US-Europe venture, continues to do yeoman’s works by providing us amazing pictures of Saturn and its neighborhood. We have circled the small Enceladus (only 504 kilometers across) as it was photographed by the wide angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft, from a distance of approximately 948,000 kilometers from Saturn.
These images of Saturn and Titan probably provided astronomers and scientists with a lot of valuable information but regardless, they are also very nice to look at (for everyone). This crescent phase of Saturn and its moon Titan was captured by the Cassini orbiter’s on board camera systems, taken while Cassini was looking towards the sunlit side of Saturn’s rings from just above the ring plane. The spacecraft was approximately 1.7 million kilometers from Saturn when it took this violet light image in 2013.
Dr. Paul Schenk from the Lunar and Planetary Institute used data collected by Cassini spacecraft over its first ten years of exploring Saturn and its moons. In this color mosaic of Saturn’s 396 kilometer wide moon Mimas, we can see the large impact crater which is called Herschel, after the German-British astronomer William Herschel who discovered it in 1789. The colors shown in this composite global mosaics are enhanced, relative to human vision, extending into the ultraviolet and infrared range.
The Cassini orbiter continues to provide some amazing pictures of the giant planet Saturn, its rings and many moons. In this instance it used its wide-angle camera from a distance of 897,000 kilometers from Saturn to capture part of the planet along with its baffling rings. Also (barely) seen in this image are two of Saturn’s tiny icy brotherly moons Prometheus (just above the A ring) and Epimetheus (further way, top left in the image).
