Thursday, March 01, 2007

Saturn in all its glory

Oh. My. Look at these.
Saturn and its rings
The Cassini-Huygens webpage says:
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 in this view, taken on Jan. 19, 2007, in contrast to what Cassini saw when it arrived in 2004 (see Frigid Ringworld below).

frigid Saturn

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1 Comments:

At 5:55 AM, March 02, 2007 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

I'm testing the comment section here, so I'll just repeat: Wow.

 

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