Saturn in true color

**kurt** · 12-30-2009, 11:21 AM

Saturn, stately and resplendent in this natural color view, dwarfs the icy moon Rhea.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) orbits beyond the rings on the right of the image. The moon Tethys is not shown here, but its shadow is visible on the planet on the left of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 72 kilometers (45 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit Cassini-Huygens. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

**Gidget** · 12-31-2009, 06:46 AM

Very nice! We used to have a huge telescope when we lived out in the boonies. I miss it. I loved seeing the rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter and nebulae etc...

Thanks for posting!

**Miss Critter** · 12-31-2009, 08:23 AM

You know you've had too much mass media exposure when your first thought when seeing that is that it looks like a scene from Star Wars.

Thanks for the reminder of the beautiful and amazing world we live in. I'm grateful to be part of this groovy universe.

**Gidget** · 12-31-2009, 09:07 AM

Originally Posted by MissCritter

You know you've had too much mass media exposure when your first thought when seeing that is that it looks like a scene from Star Wars.

Thanks for the reminder of the beautiful and amazing world we live in. I'm grateful to be part of this groovy universe.

I thought so too - "That's no moon, it's a space station" type thing.

Man the original Star Wars was SO great

**kurt** · 12-31-2009, 09:05 AM

Check out this one - http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/3...11667_full.jpg

one that happens at Saturn's equinox, which is an event that only happens twice in 10,179 Earth days. And this time, we had Cassini there to take this amazing photo, just when the sun illuminates the rings edge-on. As Carolyn Porco—Cassini imaging team leader—puts it:

The geometry revealed structures and phenomena in the rings we had never seen before. We saw this famous adornment spring from two dimensions into three, with some ring structures soaring as high as the Rocky Mountains. It made me feel blessed.

The team used Cassini during a week to take photos of vertical clumps in the ring, and when the equinox happened, they could measure their true size looking at the shadows. According to NASA's Bob Pappalardo at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

It's like putting on 3-D glasses and seeing the third dimension for the first time. This is among the most important events Cassini has shown us.