A Moondance, As Seen from Saturn

Image by NASA

What the world needs now is more pictures from outer space. Or, at least, WE sure do!

Today's fix comes from Astronomy Picture of the Day, which brings this stunning photo taken from the Cassini satellite that's currently spinning comfortably around Saturn. APOD explains:

What's that behind Titan? It's another of Saturn's moons: Tethys. The robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn captured the heavily cratered Tethys slipping behind Saturn's atmosphere-shrouded Titan late last year. The largest crater on Tethys, Odysseus, is easily visible on the distant moon. Titan shows not only its thick and opaque orange lower atmosphere, but also an unusual upper layer of blue-tinted haze. Tethys, at about 2 million kilometers distant, was twice as far from Cassini as was Titan when the above image was taken. In 2004, Cassini released the Hyugens probe which landed on Titan and provided humanity's first viewssurface of the Solar System's only known lake-bearing moon.

Comments

[johnny0]

Awesome. Cassini are tax dollars well spent. Also:

- Sunlight glinting of Titan's methane lakes
- Titan's shadow on the surface of Saturn.

And when the mission ends in 2016-17, they are thinking about pushing Cassini *through* the ring gaps. Then in a grand finale, they want to narrow the orbit between the *inner-most ring* and the surface, 3800km above the cloud tops. Holy crap.

[Rene]

Thanks to start publishing again! Greetings from Belgium.