Eyecandy from Cassini

Click - please do - to enlarge!

The Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn has made a host of scientific discoveries, but this one you can just put in the awe column - it's simply beautiful. The little moon above the rings is Epimetheus, while in the background lurks huge Titan, the one Saturnian moon we easily see in small telescopes.

I still like seeing this stuff for myself, but looking at images, such as this one, certainly helps us understand what we are seeing at the eyepiece.

The dark region in the ring is known as the Encke gap - it's 325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide and if we have real steady skies - exceptionally steady - we can see that with our small telscopes. But the gap we usually see isn't visible here, but it's called the Cassini Division - the same Cassini for whom the spacecraft is named.

Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across and Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) .

From the press release:

"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: May 12, 2006 (PIA 07786)
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