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Blinding Saturn
PIA 08362
Avg Rating: 8.02/10
Full Size 4152x2928:
JPEG 1.0 MB
PNG 7.9 MB
TIFF 18.6 MB
Half Size 2076x1464:
JPEG 326 KB
PNG 2.1 MB
TIFF 4.6 MB
Quarter Size 1023x722:
JPEG 102 KB
PNG 568 KB
TIFF 1.2 MB
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Surely one of the most gorgeous sights the Solar System has to offer, Saturn sits enveloped by the full splendor of its stately rings.
Taking in the rings in their entirety was the focus of this particular imaging sequence. Therefore, the camera exposure times were just right to capture the dark-side of its rings but longer than that required to properly expose the globe of sunlit Saturn. Consequently, the sunlit half of the planet is overexposed.
Between the blinding light of day and the dark of night, there is a strip of twilight on the globe where colorful details in the atmosphere can be seen. Bright clouds dot the bluish-grey northern polar region here. In the south, the planet's night side glows golden in reflected light from the rings' sunlit face.
Saturn's shadow stretches completely across the rings at this time, in contrast to what Cassini saw when it arrived in 2004 (see PIA05429).
The view is a mosaic of 36 images -- that is, 12 separate sets of red, green and blue images -- taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 40 degrees above the ringplane.
The images in this natural color view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.23 million kilometers (764,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 70 kilometers (44 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: March 1, 2007 (PIA 08362)
Image/Caption Information |
Alliance Member Comments
It is amazing to think that an object so beautiful and graceful, exists within our Solar System. Thank you to all the team at Cassini for continuing to bring these amazing images to us.
I first saw Saturn's disc and rings way back in 1973, as a 15-year-old English schoolboy peering excitedly through a 6" reflecting telescope. I never thought I would live to see such an astonishing image of this most majestic of the outer planets, from such a unique vantage point. Thanks, Cassini imaging team: this is the ultimate trip!
i've been waiting for these for the longest time.. i was so excited to see them, i showed them to my CAD class. lovely. thank you!
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