Sunday, January 11, 2009

Saturnian Eclipse



From "astronomy picture of the day":. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun..... the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system... the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn and slightly scattering sunlight...... Visible in spectacular detail is Saturn's E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus, and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth

3 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

click on the picture. It's quite spectacular on the screen.

My Frontier Thesis said...

Just clicked it. Here's to our petri dish, the one we know of as Earth off in the distance.

My Frontier Thesis said...

Beautiful pic by the way, too.