Saturn Enhanced
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
Saturn Enhanced
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Saturn,The Rite of Spring, Enhanced.
Spectacular image of Saturn at equinox.
Seen from Earth, the view of Saturn's rings during equinox is extremely limited. In orbit around Saturn, Cassini had no such problems. From 20 degrees above the ring plane, Cassini shot 75 exposures for this mosaic showing Saturn, its rings, and a few of its moons a day and a half after exact Saturn equinox, when the sun's disk was exactly overhead at the planet's equator.
The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's angle to the ring plane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and to cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years.
Also at equinox, the shadows of the planet's expansive rings are compressed into a single, narrow band cast onto the planet as seen in this mosaic.
At this time so close to equinox, illumination of the rings by sunlight reflected off the planet vastly dominates any meager sunlight falling on the rings. Hence, the half of the rings on the left illuminated by planetshine is much brighter than the half of the rings on the right.
The moon Janus (111 miles across) is on the left of this image. Epimetheus (70 miles) appears near the middle bottom. Pandora (50 miles) orbits outside the rings on the right of the image. The small moon Atlas (19 miles) orbits inside the thin F ring on the right of the image.
Original image and text by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Further image enhancements and post processing by Weston Westmoreland.
More enhanced NASA/Hubble images one copy-paste away at https://weston-westmoreland.pixels.com/collections/astronomy
Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
June 11th, 2018
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