Atlas resolved? Shame it has so little contrast against the rings.

This one has three moons:

Notice the sliver of Titan at the very top. Here's one taken at nearly the same time:

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Moraliser Overtax Porn

It really is worth people browsing all of the latest batch of photos - there are some real beauties. When Cassini threads its way through Saturn's moons like this, the mission controllers must be hard pressed to decide where to point the camera next.

Almost reminds me of kids in the back of a car on vacation in a new country - "Ohh - look over here!" "No, you come look this way!"...

Great stuff =D>

Ooh, ooh, another one - Mimas silhouetted in front of the rings:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi...iImageID=33230

But then, people tell me I'm a complete sucker for silhouettes. Moons and rings, dust clouds in the Crab Nebula, M51 and its buddy - backlight it and I'll be right there. Used to drive a Silhouette, even, until that guy in the sporty red car with no insurance wasn't looking during that turn...

Some guy made an animated GIF from this:

http://www.skytrip.de/temp/animation2.gif

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Isn't the moon in back actually Tethys? I see Ithaca Chasma there. Also Rhea is bigger, though there might be perspective tricks going on.

Hmm, from the time of the occultation it appears that it really is Rhea, and there is a perspective trick going on. If so, then what I thought was Ithaca Chasma is actually relief in Rhea's wispy terrain, which is interesting in itself.

I ran a simulation with Celestia. It seems that Tethys passed behind Dione, but on 21th February. It was nowhere near Dione in 20th February, but Rhea was. Celestia view looks almost identical to real Cassini view, althoug Dione don't quite occult Rhea thanks to minor uncertainties.

According to Celestia, just a moment earlier Dione occulted also Enceladus.

If you have Celestia installed you can see the event by clicking this link.

If you think it's necessary to include all those cool images, could you put some line breaks between them, like I did in the quote, so the images don't abut horizontally and force much scrolling to read the text? Thanks.

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Seems to be a browser issue. With Firefox, he puts as much in one line as there is room and then the rest in the next line. Is it really my pics that force scrolling or is it some other long link in another posting? My browser starts horizontal scrolling because of some links ngc3314 posted.

Harald

[added] Browser issue. IE makes one long horizontal display of all images. I'm going to fix this. Sorry for the inconvenience.
[added] I put a blank between each link, so now the IE also wraps.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

That's beter. Thank you.

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I'm just relieved the two moons didn't run into each other....phew! :P

(Mind you *that* would have been quite a show)

The fact that I managed to confuse Rhea for Tethys got me thinking, and I came up with a pet theory (mind you, I am not a real planetary scientist, so I could be completely off base here):

I've been thinking of Rhea and Dione as similar bodies (except in size), and Tethys as different from the two. But perhaps the only thing differentiating Tethys is a matter of chance.

All three moons are generally bright on the leading hemisphere, and apparently stained by some darker material overlaying the old craters on the trailing hemisphere; this is most pronounced for the case of Dione and least for Tethys, but you can see it on all three. (In the case of Tethys, the darker hemisphere is the one with the cross-shaped arrangement of craters of which the largest is Penelope.) And all three moons have a giant system of what are probably tectonic rifts of some sort crossing a hemisphere.

For the case of Dione and Rhea, the rifted hemisphere happens to be approximately the same as the stained hemisphere, and the rifts show up as bright wisps against the darker background. For the case of Tethys, they do not coincide. For Voyager, the rift system was lit in such a manner as to present prominent topographic relief, and we call it Ithaca Chasma.

Perhaps the coincidence on Dione and Rhea is due to chance, and all three moons experienced more or less the same history.

Mimas, with Saturn as a backdrop.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Features on Saturn's moon Phoebe given names

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

One thing I like about the Mimas pics in particular is that they drive home just how HUGE Saturn is. Maybe its just the angles they used, or the fact that the rings amplify the effect, but even pics with Jupiter and the Galileans lack the kind of perspective these give.

Here is a set of Hyperion images taken recently by Cassini:

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I'm watching the next couple of days' worth of raw images in the faint hope that someone thought of a sceintifically useful reason to get images during today's transit of Titan across the disk of Saturn. A little something for everyone - curved ring shadow, edge-on rings, big fat moon covered with haze...

Is this a transit as seen from Earth or as seen from Cassini?

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut