Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/4
73 mm
1/20
400
by Saturn
as seen by the Cassini spacecraft
and shared at TED by Carolyn Porco, team leader for the Cassini imaging scientists.
20 responses to “Total Eclipse of the Sun”
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What a privilege it is for us to see this amazing image!!! Thanks for sharing it!
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nhr: It’s a Sony HD projected image (no glass or lenses). The flares you see above and below are part of the original image.
A close up of Earth
Ken: I assume you mean the rotational distortion of the gas-giant itself. Here it looks more like a perfect sphere, a good eye patch for the sun. =)
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Assuming this picture isn’t the result of yet another NASA hoax —like the Apollo lunar missions, which, as any sensible person knows, have all been staged in a movie studio 😉 — I can see two ways this picture could have been made:
– Cassini deployed two powerful, presumably wirelessly controlled flashes left and right of Saturn to lift the planet’s shadow a bit in this very challenging backlight situation
– an HDR-like compositing (using Photoshop layers ? 😉 of 2 pics: the normally-exposed rings and a long exposure of the almost black, nocturnal side of the planet.
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nhr: This is the "Color-exaggerated" version of a composite image built from Cassini photos.
"This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color."
See the original:
saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?i…The color-exaggerated:
saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?i…It’s real. Making it all the more amazing.
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got it! the original looks round, the color exaggerated somehow distorts to the planet looking tall and ovoid.
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What this looks like to the untrained eye is Saturn. But it really is a mirror with reflecting light bouncing off the mirror to create the rings.
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What an interesting image, why don’t the rings on the planet match up with the rings out side the main body?
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and a departing view of Earth… Goodbye Earth
The Cassini wide angle lens captured Earth 900 million miles in the distance on July 19, 2013. When I saw a crop of this photo in Space News this evening, it caught my breath.
Saturn is a gem of the skies, 100x as massive as Earth, sporting supersonic winds and 62 moons — the largest of which, Titan, is bigger than Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Hello twisted sister.
Saturn’s rings are 99.9% ice and extend out 80km, more than doubling the radius of the planet, but I never imagined how thin they are, averaging only 20m thick (an average building in Manhattan).
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And now, the best theory yet as to the rings formed, recently:
"Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune, as Saturn’s tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rate as the orbit of Neptune.
But a new modeling study by astronomers at MIT and elsewhere has found that, while the two planets may have once been in sync, Saturn has since escaped Neptune’s pull. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The team has one meticulously tested hypothesis: a missing moon.
In a study appearing today in Science, the team proposes that Saturn, which today hosts 83 moons, once harbored at least one more, an extra satellite that they name Chrysalis. Together with its siblings, the researchers suggest, Chrysalis orbited Saturn for several billion years, pulling and tugging on the planet in a way that kept its tilt, or “obliquity,” in resonance with Neptune.
But around 160 million years ago, the team estimates, Chrysalis became unstable and came too close to its planet in a grazing encounter that pulled the satellite apart. The loss of the moon was enough to remove Saturn from Neptune’s grasp and leave it with the present-day tilt.
What’s more, the researchers surmise, while most of Chrysalis’ shattered body may have made impact with Saturn, a fraction of its fragments could have remained suspended in orbit, eventually breaking into small icy chunks to form the planet’s signature rings."
— MIT News
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