From planetary.org: On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera: Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Rhea, and Mimas. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011.
Cassini Image of Mimas & Tethys
Taken 2006. Posted by landru79.
Atlas Close-Up
There’s another crazy saucer shaped moon at Saturn. We posted last month about the tiny moon Pan and now there’s Atlas. Another oddly shaped moon imaged up-close just days before Cassini’s Grand Finale begins.
The Exotic Tiny Moon Pan
Pan is a moon of the planet Saturn and also happens to have an unusual job “Ring Shepherd”. These are moons which help maintain the many gaps we find within Saturn’s rings. Pan is shown above in it’s natural habitat within the Encke Division of Saturn’s rings. But take a look at what Pan looks like up-close (below).
We have seen this kind of phenomenon at Saturn before, but never quite this dramatic. A small standard potato shaped moon transformed by the accumulation of ring dust and particles into a ravioli shaped moon.
Worth noting that the color shown above is mostly true. The red channel is replaced by infrared and blue channel replaced by ultraviolet — both offer a view that comes close to what you would see with natural light (RGB).
All images were taken by Cassini in March 2017 and processed by Ian Regan.
Saturn’s Rings Slip Into Shade
Saturnati XXXI
Okay, so it is not totally real. An IR filter was added to the normal RGB files to exaggerate the clouds. Also made the rings appear red. But we couldn’t find a version of this image without the added filter. So — it is about 80% true color. Seen on The Planetary Society image library by Judy Schmidt.
Cyber Tuesday Spaceprobe Deal
For two days only, buy one of our limited edition Robotic Spacecraft Series Prints and get the full suite of vinyl stickers for free. This is a total savings of $24 and would serve as a great stocking stuffer to follow the presentation of the print.
Poster #2: Cassini / Huygens
Consider backing our Kickstarter project and get this Cassini poster, Voyager or Curiosity (or all three) as large scale screen-printed posters.
Historic Robotic Spacecraft Poster Survey
Our new Kickstarter project proposes the creation of three screen-printed posters celebrating the most popular and notable interplanetary robotic space missions in history. Going into this, we knew that poster #1 had to go to the hugely popular Voyager missions (shown above). However, we need your help selecting the themes of posters #2 and #3. So head over to The Planetary Society now to vote on your three favorite missions, but do it by the 19th to have it count for the poster selection. If this goes better than expected we could even wind up designing a fourth or fifth.
Kickstarter Project Coming Oct 2
Our new Kickstarter campaign will be live in a few days. Above are a few of the celestial assets illustrated for the animation/video we are producing for the campaign page.
Discover’s Best of Amateur Imagers
Discover online has an article today about some of the best in amateur space imaging. Many of which have been featured here on Wanderingspace before like Gordan Ugarkovic, Emily Lakdawalla and Bjorn Jonsson to name a few. The last item from Bill Dunford of Riding With Robots is an image that he actually suggested NASA point their HiRise cameras at that location. He suspected they might find something interesting there and they did —flash water movement and evidence of avalanches.
Saturnati XXX
A fine, fine portrait of Saturn for #30! Created by Ian Regan. There is also an amazing “enhanced” version of the same image going around on Twitter.
Check Out Kurzgesagt
Especially if you have kids with an appreciation for science. These guys regularly do great animations that explain complex science — appropriate for all ages. They also promise a series of cool videos about cool moons in our solar system. So far they have only covered our own, next up… Mars’ Deimos and Phobos.
Saturnati XXIX
Not sure how I missed this one. From a long while back on Gordan Ugarkovic’s Flickr feed.
Uranus as Seen from Saturn
Pretty cool detail caught by two imagers whose work I have been noticing more and more of late. That small blue dot is not Earth, but it is Uranus as it appears from Saturn orbit. Reminds me of this post of our own moon seen with other heavenly bodies within the same frame.
Taken by Cassini on April 11, 2014 and processed by Ian Regan with montage by Val Klavans.
Saturnati XXIIX
In the words of Gordan Ugarkovic, the unchallenged freelance imager of our time — “On October 10th, Cassini wide-angle camera captured a set of 12 RGB footprints covering Saturn and the rings. Here's an attempt at compositing that data into a mosaic. It's not geometrically accurate, but I tried coaxing the data into at least looking nice”.
Saturnati XXVII
Saturnati XXVI
Another from Ian Regan.
Enceladus Lost in the Ring Haze
The tiny but very active moon Enceladus is seen here lost within the E-Ring of Saturn. The moon, as many of us know, is quite active with cryo-volcanic geysers littered throughout the ridges of the “tiger stripes” found mostly in the moon’s southern hemisphere. Since most of the ejecta from Enceladus is jettisoned fast enough to escape the tiny moon’s gravity, most the material winds up orbiting Saturn itself and is therefore helping over a very long period of time to form Saturn’s E-Ring. This at least partly helps solve the question of where Saturn’s massive ring structure originates.
Image by Val Klavans.
Saturnati XXV
Another from Gordan Ugarkovic.