6
Dec
Amazing Cassini Photograph
Topic: General Silliness
I recently came across this photograph from the Cassini spacecraft. Click on it for the full-size version. And see the explanation of exactly what it is you’re looking at. If I understood it correctly, the blue area is Saturn’s northern hemisphere, and off in the distance is the moon Mimas. The dark lines are caused by shadows from Saturn’s B ring. The really bright patch near Mimas is light streaming through the Cassini Division. The tan lines across the bottom are the actual A and F rings, which are further out than the B ring (leave it to astronomers to not put them in alphabetical order).
The space photography I’m used to seeing tends to be grainy. I was amazed by the vividness of this picture.
An interesting bit of trivia is the scale of the image: 14 miles per pixel.
Another bit of related autobiographical trivia: In 1999 I was hired as a webmaster at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, but the position was cut for budgetary reasons before I even started. It wouldn’t have paid well, but it would’ve been a fantastic experience.
Print
